Famgopolies [1] behave different than monopolies. But they're every bit, if not more, dangerous.
They use their incredible market power and cash piles to enter new markets with ease and put price pressure on the incumbents. It's hard to compete with free. Then all the other famgopolies enter the space too, and it's just a famgopoly watering hole.
Their objective: capturing attention and keeping their users on their platforms longer. They use their platform bubbles to capture a large group of users that will never leave their services. Like Apple users. They're all in a bubble, and if you want access, you have to pay a steep tax and jump to the beat of the their whims.
And this isn't a new kind of monopoly? It's a monopolization in a new sense: they wrap their shroud over individuals and companies and keep them attached at the hip. Switching costs become incredible.
Apple, Google, and Amazon are turning us into serfs. They have a quasi republic going on that they tax and control. You can't start new businesses. You can't escape. If they target your small market, you're screwed.
The DOJ needs to break these companies up into twenty or so smaller ones that don't form a cobweb of entrapment.
Apple/Google/etc fans and shareholders will disagree, but these companies are hurting our industry and soaking up all the innovation.
[1] FAAMG companies with supremely anticompetitive behavior
I don't think we need a new word for this. What you've described is a cartel [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel]. To the extent that they restrain trade, prohibit competition, or artificially increase costs on consumers, cartels are already illegal in the US.
What you're describing looks more like the supermarket shelves. Some 80% of products in the cereal aisle are owned by three companies. Nobody really cares, but the switching costs to get a cereal outside that controlled space turn out to be pretty high (just try it with a family with kids).
If you want to make your own cereal, good luck; the supermarkets trust the Big Three and are pretty uninterested in flighting something new; shelf space is finite and people don't trust off-brand cereals.
The cereals care more about attention than price-competition. They know it's all the same crap; they want you to care more about whether there's a bear or a frog on the box.
And the same companies that make the cereals make several other verticals too, all carved similarly.
This configuration has not, generally, been considered illegal in terms of market regulation in the US. The standard is harm to consumers, not harm to non-incumbent manufacturers. Your battle to show why either of these spaces should be regulated more stringently is uphill against the default in the US to take a hands-off approach to market activity unless necessary to cure an obvious ill (and the ills here are non-obvious; how do we show the cereal market, or the software-services market, don't look the way they do because the incumbent players have hit on a locally-optimal approach to give value to customers, while customers are satisfied? Amazon, for example, are bastards, but they're bastards that have managed to unlock such efficient distribution and value-satisfaction for their customers that they rendered an entire ecosystem of competitors as obsolete as the buggy-whip manufacturer).
I think you have that analogy backwards. Google, Apple, and Amazon are the supermarkets. But they're also filling the shelves with their own products. It might not be too different from Walmart, save for a few points:
- They make it hard for consumers to shop at other stores. Or repair their devices (bad analogy).
- They're doing all kinds of things a supermarket would never do. Like turning into music and movie studios.
- The really sad thing is that before the giants sprang into existence, you could distribute your software and services without the need for a supermarket. Famgopolies created an artificial warehousing system and forced us all into it.
- They make it hard for consumers to shop at other stores.
As a user of Apple, Google, and Amazon tech for decades, I simply disagree on the other two. You'll have to clarify in what way Google and Amazon make it hard to shop at other stores. Google, in particular, enables side-loading on every Android device. Of the three you've named, Apple is the biggest offender, and it appears they have touched the hot stove, unless this Court's ruling becomes reversed. But they touched it in a way that Google and Amazon do not, unless I'm missing something.
I don't think a world where F-droid continues to exist is one where we can claim Google, in particular, is a supermarket that makes it hard to shop at other stores.
- They're doing all kinds of things a supermarket would never do
That's not by itself illegal, or discouraged. Traditionally, companies have considered such expansion a bad idea because they expose themselves to outsized risk in a market downturn. But there are examples of other companies doing that. Sony is a hardware manufacturer and a movie producer. Disney owns theme parks and movie production. Proctor & Gamble make some 90% of what goes in, on, or around the American body and home that you can buy off a store shelf (including many apparently-competing products). ViacomCBS owns theme parks, television studios, book publishing, heavy-industry machinery, and nuclear technology.
- The really sad thing is that before the giants sprang into existence, you could distribute your software and services without the need for a supermarket
I remember, and what I remember is, I think, one of the reasons American law tends to take a relatively hands-off approach in this space.
The user experience from the era you're describing, to be blunt, sucked. Mobile devices, when apps could be loaded on them at all, where hard-to-manage, the apps were buggy, and they were hard to find. Lack of standards, lack of oversight, no trust that any given app wasn't a security mess (or just a Trojan) without something like brand recognition to rely upon. It wasn't just Apple and Google who changed that; we saw Steam come along and regularize the games-on-PCs space, we saw package management get more robust in the Linux ecosystem... People weren't forced into software catalog ecosystems, they ran to them and brain-drained alternatives because most of the alternatives were actively painful.
The government wants to avoid stepping on the neck of a better customer experience inadvertently via over-regulation.
And perhaps most importantly: you can still do that. You can still write an Android app and put it on F-droid, or self-sign it and give users instructions for enabling side-loading. But you won't see the adoption you will in using the big app stores, because the big app stores are a way better experience for most users. Outside of those app stores, discovery, reputation-tracking, consumer communication, anti-Trojan safeguards, etc. are '90s era.
> >The really sad thing is that before the giants sprang into existence, you could distribute your software and services without the need for a supermarket
> I remember, and what I remember is, I think, one of the reasons American law tends to take a relatively hands-off approach in this space.
It is a false dilemma that you either have vetted apps with Apple, or unvetted apps.
You could still have other app stores reviewing apps. That would increase competition but still let users choose safety over a Wild West.
And brands who have gone to great efforts to obtain user trust can sell directly.
How does this differ from traditional brick and mortar retail? The retailers posed a barrier to selling to consumers at scale and wholesale prices, I think, were closer to 50% of retail markup.
Sure, manufactures could find small retailers and build a following from there, or find ways to market direct to consumers. But it seems like that is still true, if not even easier in the modern age. So what is different. I ask this not rhetorically, clearly there are differences. Is the scale the difference? Was it always wrong and we just didn't see it a clearly? Is the smaller number retailer the major factor?
No brick and mortar store has anywhere close to Apple’s dominance on mobile apps and the retail industry is not a defacto duopoly. Apple and Google control 95% of the global app market. Apple alone was 65% last year.
For reference, Walmart and Amazon have about 14% and 10% market share respectively. Numbers differ from report to report, but the scale of difference is pretty clear.
> It's a new game, and we need new definitions. [..] Famgopolies (FAAMG companies with supremely anticompetitive behavior) behave different than monopolies.
There are many authors that have been exploring the economic aspect of platforms. As such nowadays that phenomenon is know as "platform capitalism" in literature due to Nick Srnicek's 2016 Polity book of the same name. [1]
Famgopolies [1] behave different than monopolies. But they're every bit, if not more, dangerous.
They use their incredible market power and cash piles to enter new markets with ease and put price pressure on the incumbents. It's hard to compete with free. Then all the other famgopolies enter the space too, and it's just a famgopoly watering hole.
Their objective: capturing attention and keeping their users on their platforms longer. They use their platform bubbles to capture a large group of users that will never leave their services. Like Apple users. They're all in a bubble, and if you want access, you have to pay a steep tax and jump to the beat of the their whims.
And this isn't a new kind of monopoly? It's a monopolization in a new sense: they wrap their shroud over individuals and companies and keep them attached at the hip. Switching costs become incredible.
Apple, Google, and Amazon are turning us into serfs. They have a quasi republic going on that they tax and control. You can't start new businesses. You can't escape. If they target your small market, you're screwed.
The DOJ needs to break these companies up into twenty or so smaller ones that don't form a cobweb of entrapment.
Apple/Google/etc fans and shareholders will disagree, but these companies are hurting our industry and soaking up all the innovation.
[1] FAAMG companies with supremely anticompetitive behavior