Could we apply a progressive tax to large corporations (like big tech monopolies) to force them to figure out what aspects of their own business should be split up and spun out to keep the size of companies roughly equal to "one layer of the stack".
Seems like a progressive corporation tax would be an easy way to allow "the market" to naturally limit the size of corporations and find the correct separation points for separate businesses.
Really random thought: the tax you pay on profit is proportional (or even 1:1) to your market share. Become a monopoly? 100% of your profit is now taxed.
Nicer to stay at eg. 25% and have competition. Maybe ramp it exponentially
(yes, I know there are loopholes in this pie-in-the-sky)
North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). NAICS uses a hierarchical structure with sectors represented by 2-digit codes, such as Manufacturing (31-33) or Retail Trade (44-45).
In antitrust law, a "market" is defined as an area of effective competition that includes both product (or service) and geographic dimensions. The US Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission use market definitions to evaluate competition under laws like the Clayton Act.
Tools like the hypothetical monopolist test are used to determine whether a market is too narrow by assessing if a monopolist could profitably raise prices.
> Also, if you invent something so novel it makes a new market, that would imply you are immediately taxed at 100%.
I'd be more inclined to scale it based on total revenue. There's a big difference between having 100% of a new market you just recently created that only makes $1M/year and having 90% of a decade-old market that makes $10B/year.
(That said, there are a hundred other things that'd need fixing for such a hypothetical to be viable, let alone desirable. This was just the thing that stood out the most to me, particularly on a site centered around startups.)
> Also, if you invent something so novel it makes a new market
That's innovation, which is not the issue here. Creating new markets is usually win-win (initially), even with big tech leading the way.
The more damaging issue is in taking over existing markets in ways that do not benefit that market. e.g Big tech Moving into film and TV, it's not simply a buyout with massive capital, it's about burning money in one ancillary market to benefit their primary market, but usually at a detriment to the ancillary one. They are unfairly leveraging their primary market position, tying products together, even if they don't ever make any profit in the movies, they create more and more lock-in with their platforms, making it harder and harder to not use them. The overall affect, more profit, without a chance of competition.
Bundling is explicitly recognized as antitrust concern. Using a monopoly in one area to undercut a competitor is what Microsoft and Google were both found guilty of by the DoJ, so it's funny you should mention them. It's not about being prohibited from developing new products, but in how you price them, and giving away things for free because you can afford to due to your monopoly in one area, and your competitors can't is the crime, or forcing people to buy both of your products together at the same time, is the problem, as enforced by the DoJ. Google should be free to develop Chrome, but funding all of its development from advertising profit and then giving it away for free because you can because you have a monopoly in search advertising is the problem, because Mozilla doesn't have search advertising monopoly money or desktop operating system monopoly to be able to give their browser away for free and fund further development from those sales. This is why, as part of the Google breakup is for them to sell off Chrome.
This also means google should not give away for free any of their gmail service, youtube?, chrome, maps or any such thing. All of these are funded by the ad money
> That's innovation, which is not the issue here. Creating new markets is usually win-win
You're preaching to the choir here. The post I was replying to described a policy that would have made that an issue, without some way of addressing that case.
It's a good idea and a systemic nudge towards the outcome we want. (Probably minimum 3 large competitors in every market)
Market definition should be tied to revenue source. It'd be difficult, but doesn't seem insurmountable.
The Android/iPhone problem is somewhat of a unique case, given mobile's size. IMHO "unreasonable to non-monopolize" should be an option... but come with FRAND interconnection requirements as a consequence of designation (e.g. Android/iPhone both have to offer the ability for other apps stores to be implemented, and can only charge those stores FRAND fees)
And novelty / new markets could be solved by progressively implementing the tax rate increases as the market matures (e.g. first 5 years).
The potential benefit is lots of electricity, which may be abundant that when amortized over the "high capital costs" could be much more cost effective than wind, solar, and storage, or may not be. We have to invest in these relatively small projects to figure that out.
Furthermore, the highly geographically concentrated energy production from fusion power could work really well for energy consumers with a similarly localized nature. I'm thinking large scale carbon capture, energy intensive materials manufacturing or processing, or large scale ocean water desalination.
No, actually fusion is likely to be even more expensive than fission, and fission already cannot compete with wind and solar. Fusion takes the biggest problem of fission, high capital cost, and makes it worse, while reducing fuel costs, which are only a minor part of the cost of fission. It's bass-ackwards engineering.
I would recommend still reading books written by journalists since some can be very good. But for these books adjust your Goodreads rating threshold to something more like 4.2 or 4.3 for journalist-written books.
I think (just like the thermostat). This is a trojan horse. Nest trying to get a sensors into your home. Specifically presence sensor in every single room of the house. This will be their foundation for a vastly improved home control UI. They will take the lessons they learned with the learning thermostat temperature control and use that for the rest of your home, with the input being location, number of people, etc...
At least that is what I would do if I were Nest :-)
We're hoping to connect devices like the Kill-a-watt to people's smart phones. Gamification is totally in the mix!
We are trying to figure out if just knowing if something is on or off (not the energy usage) could be valuable if we could do this for the whole house.
Seems like a progressive corporation tax would be an easy way to allow "the market" to naturally limit the size of corporations and find the correct separation points for separate businesses.