Re: Warren's proposal on "Public Platforms"
I am not anti-regulation at all - I am against heavy handed dumb regulation. It is a lot more nuanced than you think and it should not be left to clueless legislators in search of soundbites to further their own political agenda.
Let me demonstrate by going through a brief examination of Amazon - which is the current hot target. Amazon has several major revenue streams. They are dominant and big in almost all of them. But they are not anywhere near being a monopoly in any of them and importantly nobody has shown that any harm has come to the consumers from their size. To the contrary, one can make a compelling case that net-net they have been beneficial. Here's a brief overview:
Amazon has a (1) online retail business. This is what most people are familiar with. This business is a platform that is open to everyone. It competes with eBay, Walmart Alibaba, etc - all of whom are huge and strong competitors. In fact it also competes with much smaller companies such as Newegg and Tiger Direct - and seeing how both have flourished in recent years, it is hard to argue there is a harmful monopoly power at work in this space.
Amazan has a (2) Logistics revenue where they handle warehousing, delivering, and even import clearance. Here they compete with DHL, UPS, etc. and yes, even Walmart. So again, no monopoly.
They also have a (3) AWS Cloud platform, which competes with Microsoft Azure, Google GCP, Alibaba, and to a smaller extent with IBM and Oracle. These are hardly weaklings to be afraid of Amazon.
Amazon has a (4) Media delivery services. They do content delivery. Video production. Films services. Transcription and translation. Etc. Again, they are not the only fish in that sea. They are not even the dominant one. You can see them competing with Netflix and many others here.
And they have a (5) AI and IOT business (including Alexa), where they compete with Google, IBM, Intel, MS, etc.
So now Warren wants to use the combined revenues from all these streams as an arbitrary metric for regulation. But why is that a problem if they are not a monopoly in any of those fields?
Furthermore, and the thing that none of these idiots is considering, is the huge cost of hauling hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber optics under the oceans and managing huge datacenters around the globe. No government is willing to build that infrastructure. So far only a few companies such as Google and Amazon have done so (at last count there were about 7 that I knew of, but the rest are much smaller - though still big). How is that need going to be met?
This is how you get to have a bad name for government regulation. There are many ways to address the problems, when they become a problem. But shooting from the hip because it sounds good is not something that I approve of. |
