Are tech titans the robber barons of our gilded age?

[Stevicus]

Tech Titans Are the Robber Barons of Our Gilded Age

Apple’s battle with Epic is a reminder that today’s tech companies behave like 19th-century monopolists. Installing democratic control over these modern throwbacks to Gilded Age robber barons is the only way to curb their power.

jacobin.com

Apple’s battle with Epic is a reminder that today’s tech companies behave like 19th-century monopolists. Installing democratic control over these modern throwbacks to Gilded Age robber barons is the only way to curb their power.

Should tech companies be reined in by more regulation and state control? Have they gone out of control? Can they be persuaded to act more reasonably and responsibly?

That reason, no doubt at the heart of the ban, is another level of petty and disconcerting monopolist bullying from Apple. The dispute between Apple and Epic is a stark reminder of Gilded Age misconduct. Private monopolies are undesirable as a rule and contemporary tech monopolists and oligopolists — in their sheer heft and reach — represent something even worse than their twentieth-century forebears. The tech battle is a call to double down on efforts to install democratic control over these companies that shape markets and so much of our lives.

Despite this schoolyard pleading — “if you weren’t being a meany, you’d be really, really great” — what we have here is a little tech world donnybrook that uncovers the internal struggles of an otherwise united class of capitalists. Technologists in the vein of Apple and Epic want to grow their companies and dominate the market. They want to maximize their number of users and profits. They want the value of their companies to rise as high as it can go. This public tech feud is thus a family affair, yet its implications are significant for all of us.

The article points out the ultimate trap of capitalism, as they're all competing with each other - with the goal of reaching the very top and being able to shut out the competition entirely.

Left economists have long warned that capitalism tends toward oligopoly and monopoly, especially when states fail to control the market. Capitalists tend not to mind this phenomenon when they’re the monopolists. They like it far less, however, when they’re squeezed by the few giants who dominate the market.

Today’s tech behemoths are reminiscent of the robber barons of the Gilded Age. Years of fighting for antitrust laws aimed at some, any, regulation that might rebalance power. In the end, these fights managed to restrain them, and even broke some of them up, but the monopolies and oligopolies never died out.

The article goes into further detail about various countries finding ways of restricting internet platforms.

Telecom, entertainment, agriculture, news media, banking, and software giants rose throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. Today, we are facing tech companies that are even more wealthy, entrenched, and globe-spanning than some of the worst offenders of the last century. The impact of their platforms — which effectively comprise the public agora and profoundly shape public discourse — on democracy is an open question. Increasingly, it’s one freighted with creeping dread.

Governments around the world are trying once more to regulate the tech giants, aiming to curb their multinational corporate power and the technologies they deploy, often to great social and political damage. In Canada, the Online News Act tried to compel Meta and Google to return a modest amount of what they’ve extracted from consumers through payments to news outlets for content shared on the platforms. This resulted in Meta banning news from its platforms. The company is engaged in a similar fight in Australia, which pioneered the legislation Canada later adopted.

Meanwhile, US attempts at regulation keep getting lobbied to death. Or they are stuck in geopolitical and domestic strategy limbo, such as the RESTRICT Act. Setting aside issues of free expression, the looming ban of Tik Tok in the US proves that forceful regulation is not impossible. This case, however, is a rare instance of hegemonic geopolitical concerns trumping the preferences of tech behemoths, which isn’t exactly an outcome worth celebrating.

Apple has long worked to control the market, bully developers, and avoid taxes. That they should use their power to silence and undercut a critic and competitor should come as no surprise. This is monopolist 101 stuff, and it goes back longer than computers have existed, let alone Apple.

Apple’s cartoonish villainy is just a minor variation on a familiar theme. The inability of tech monopolists to share their nightmarish, habit-forming, surveillance-heavy, and exploitive technologies with one another is bog-standard market behavior. While this doesn’t justify it as right or good — in fact, quite the contrary — it does align with the self-serving rules of capitalists. There is no tech behemoth that would hesitate to act like Apple if the shoe was on the other foot. This behavior merely showcases the unchecked market power that companies aspire to wield.

So, have the tech giants become the robber barons of our age? Should they be regulated more stringently? Do they need to be broken up, like Ma Bell?

I never really used much in the way of Apple products. My dad worked for IBM, so I first started using an IBM PC from the 1980s, and then used various IBM "clones," but were different from Apple, which I didn't really care for too much. I initially thought that Apple was going to go the way of Betamax, but I guess I was wrong about that. (VHS isn't around anymore either.)

Of course, it could be argued that, if the free market can operate unfettered, then it would be expected that somebody somewhere would invent a product that's better that can compete and break the monopoly. Theoretically, someone could invent some kind of advanced computer with its own operating system and cost under $100 and leave Microsoft and Apple in the dust. But that doesn't seem likely to happen.

Thoughts?

 

[PoetPhilosopher]

Should tech companies be reined in by more regulation and state control?

At this time? Probably not.

Sometimes, there are downsides that come with a lot of regulation and state control, too.

I'd say how things are now seems about right. Where there's freedom, but also some consequences if a company goes too far.

Have they gone out of control?

They've at times tip-toed the line.

Can they be persuaded to act more reasonably and responsibly?

Probably not with just a slap on the wrist.

I never really used much in the way of Apple products. My dad worked for IBM, so I first started using an IBM PC from the 1980s, and then used various IBM "clones," but were different from Apple, which I didn't really care for too much. I initially thought that Apple was going to go the way of Betamax, but I guess I was wrong about that. (VHS isn't around anymore either.)

Of course, it could be argued that, if the free market can operate unfettered, then it would be expected that somebody somewhere would invent a product that's better that can compete and break the monopoly. Theoretically, someone could invent some kind of advanced computer with its own operating system and cost under $100 and leave Microsoft and Apple in the dust. But that doesn't seem likely to happen.

A lot of people mention Apple, but another big dog now is graphics card and AI company NVIDIA, who has gained a lot of money, and also once tried to buy a very large mobile chip company, which if I recall, was blocked because it would have created a monopoly. From what I hear, NVIDIA is becoming third place now thanks to the AI craze.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

Of course, it could be argued that, if the free market can operate unfettered, then it would be expected that somebody somewhere would invent a product that's better that can compete and break the monopoly.

My concern is not whether "the free market can operate unfettered."

Terms like "free market" and "unfettered" mask the systematic fettering of far too many over far too long.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

So, have the tech giants become the robber barons of our age? Should they be regulated more stringently? Do they need to be broken up, like Ma Bell?

I don't know about needing them broken up, but I do think it's strange how quickly we got from Microsoft losing an anti-trust suit because they bundled Internet Explorer with Windows to the state of things now.

 

[lewisnotmiller]

Of course, it could be argued that, if the free market can operate unfettered, then it would be expected that somebody somewhere would invent a product that's better that can compete and break the monopoly. Theoretically, someone could invent some kind of advanced computer with its own operating system and cost under $100 and leave Microsoft and Apple in the dust. But that doesn't seem likely to happen.

Thoughts?

The unfettered market argument gets pretty flawed when talking about more complex supply chains. For example, control chips, and you can hamstring anyone else from being able to mass produce anything. Apples competitors are much more likely to have extremely HIGH costs of production, rather than low. Control screens, and it's much the same. The market is most assuredly artificially fettered in high tech industries, and anyone who doesn't think so might be a little naive. Apple (as an example) can also just buy out any startups which might threaten, and then merge them into their own set of offerings...or push them aside entirely if there is little chance of someone else replicating.

It's like having a 100-meter race, and assuming the fastest guy is going to win. Meanwhile, one competitor gets to choose what shoes each competitor has to wear.