It's not a free market if small group of companies (let alone a single one) are able to *capture* it

Governments should have the power to prevent and restrict #monopolies and #oligopolies (and they should do it)

https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/consumer/2023/08/21/australian-monopolies-supermarkets-airlines-banks/

#Neoliberalism #USA #Monopolies #Oligopolies #Inequality: "Among the debits: deregulation, which was supposed to spur competition, has not slowed the trend toward monopoly. Despite the Telecommunications Act, just three companies—Verizon, T-Mobile, and A.T. & T.—provide ninety-nine per cent of wireless service. Six companies dominate the media in the United States: Comcast, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Global, the Fox Corporation, and Sony. Book publishing in the United States is dominated by the so-called Big Five: Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster. The music industry is dominated by just three corporate players: the Universal, Sony, and Warner music divisions.

The big fish, with their piles of capital, keep swallowing up the little fish. The Big Five would now be the Big Four if Penguin Random House’s deal to acquire Simon & Schuster had not been ruled a violation of antitrust law last fall. Of the twelve most valuable companies in the world, eight of which are tech businesses, all are monopolies or near-monopolies."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/24/the-rise-and-fall-of-neoliberalism

#USA #FTC #Monopolies #Antitrust #Oligopolies: "Take the WSJ: since Khan took office, they have published 67 vicious editorials attacking her and her policies. Khan is living rent-free in Rupert Murdoch's head. Not only that, he's given her the presidential suite! You love to see it.

These attacks are worth reading, if only to see how flimsy and frivolous they are. One major subgenre is that Khan shouldn't be bringing any action against Amazon, because her groundbreaking scholarship about the company means she has a conflict of interest. Holy moly is this a stupid thing to say. The idea that the chair of an expert agency should recuse herself because she is an expert is what the physicists call not even wrong.

But these attacks are even more laughable due to who they're coming from: people who have the most outrageous conflicts of interest imaginable, and who were conspicuously silent for years as the FTC's revolving door admitted the a bestiary of swamp-creatures so conflicted it's a wonder they managed to dress themselves in the morning."

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

#SocialMedia #NetworkEffects #BigTech #Oligopolies: "Social media needs to burn.

From its first days, the consumer computing and networking sector was synonymous with explosive growth.

Companies would spring up out of nowhere and grow to impossible scale overnight. The source of this rapid corporate gigantism was no mystery: it came from network effects.

A business, product or service enjoys “network effects” when adding more customers increases in value. Every Apple ][+ sold increased the number of people you could exchange data on floppies with; it increased the number of dealers who’d sell you accessories for your new home computer; and it increased the number of software authors and hardware companies who’d fill those dealers’ showrooms with new applications and peripherals for you to use.

Network effects are how Amazon got so big. They’re why platforms with App Stores — from games to mobile OSes — are so exciting for investors. And, of course, they’re why social media platforms exploded onto the scene in the 2000s and took over the world."

https://doctorow.medium.com/let-the-platforms-burn-6fb3e6c0d980

#AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Chatbots #AIRegulation #BigTech #Oligopolies: "Fourth, will the regulation reinforce existing power dynamics and oligopolies? When Big Tech asks to be regulated, we must ask if those regulations might effectively cement Big Tech’s own power. For example, we’ve seen multiple proposals that would allow regulators to review and license AI models, programs, and services. Government licensing is the kind of burden that big players can easily meet; smaller competitors and nonprofits, not so much. Indeed, it could be prohibitive for independent open-source developers. We should not assume that the people who built us this world can fix the problems they helped create; if we want AI models that don’t replicate existing social and political biases, we need to make enough space for new players to build them."
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/07/generative-ai-policy-must-be-precise-careful-and-practical-how-cut-through-hype

@Radical_EgoCom also most are #Oligopolies!

@Andii

Yes, I think the issue of #Oligopolies in the UK is something that needs much more attention... see my (relatively) recent piece for @NWBylines

https://northwestbylines.co.uk/politics/economy/oligopolies-market-power-and-the-exploitation-of-the-consumer/

#Capitalism #Oligopolies #Democracy #Populism #Inequality: "In sum, the problem of a just society, and of restoring that vital, delicate balance between capitalism and democracy, will go beyond unrigging capitalism—though contemporary capitalism urgently, even desperately, needs to be unrigged. As Wolf argues persuasively, rigged capitalism has fueled populist backlashes that are being exploited by plutocratic political entrepreneurs, and which threaten the very survival of liberal democracy. And without economic and political reforms, “[t]he year 2024 might mark the end of American liberal democracy.”

But this is where The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism fails to inspire. It is not that Wolf’s proposed reforms—measured, reasonable, smart, constructive—don’t make sense. It is that they seem exceedingly unlikely to be adopted. Soberly sifting through 70 pages of what a “New” New Deal might look like yields mostly agreeable generalities (“Ending special privileges for the few”) and extremely sensible reforms (greater fairness in the tax code, thoughtful forms of public investment, independent commissions to end gerrymandering, reducing corporate influence in elections, etc.). But we have all been here before."

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/rigged-capitalism-and-the-rise-of-pluto-populism-on-martin-wolfs-the-crisis-of-democratic-capitalism/

#Inflation #Economy #PoliticalEconomy #Oligopolies #Monopolies #Capitalism: "Call me a conspiratorialist if you must. But when CEOs get on earnings calls and brag about how covid, war, and scare-stories about inflation let them hike their prices and rake in never-before-seen profit margins, I think it's reasonable to blame inflation on greed, not on workers getting a couple of relief checks during the lockdown.

Amazingly, this is a controversial position! For more than a year, Very Serious People have dismissed the greedflation hypothesis – that CEOs aren't lying when they boast about using pretexts to hike prices – is a conspiracy theory used to dupe people who Just Don't Understand Economics."

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/05/wmds-two-point-oh/#or-your-lying-ears

#Capitalism #Neoliberalism #Law #IP #Antitrust #Oligopolies #Patents: "We should recognize that we establish the laws, the forms of social practice, that give markets their shape and their implications. We ought to recognize that we have authority over the design of markets and not simply say that supply and demand caused this or that.

Pharmaceuticals are a clear example of how our collective power through the state is being used to shape what are called market outcomes. We give lots of authority to companies to set prices, and then we turn around and find that the prices of medicines are rising. This stands in deep tension with the idea that we all ought to have shared access to what we need to be healthy."

https://www.the-syllabus.com/ts-spotlight/post-neoliberal-moment/conversation/amy-kapczynski

Some of the things that have appeared in my posts over the last month or so have appeared in extended form @NWBylines - so if you interested in my reflections on these:

#GDP

#ISDS - Investor State Dispute Settlement

#Taxation

#Oligopolies in the UK

#SeafarerAbandonment & the labour market

#supplychains, or

the economic aspects of #LongCovid,

you can find the articles here:
https://northwestbylines.co.uk/author/chrismay/

#USA #BigTech #USTR #Oligopolies #RegulatoryCapture: "The USTR's playbook has changfed over the years, reflecting the degree of control over the US government exerted by different sectors of the US economy. Today, with Big Tech in the driver's seat, US trade deals embody something called the "digital trade agenda," a mix of policies ranging from limiting liability, privacy protection, competition law, and data locatization.

The Digital Trade Agenda is a relatively new phenomenon. A decade ago, when the USTR went abroad to twist the arms of America's trading partners, the only "digital" part of the agenda was obligations to spy on users and to swiftly remove materials claimed to have violated US media monopolies' copyright. But as the tech sector grew more concentrated, they were able to seize a greater share America's trade priorities."

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/18/cursed-are-the-sausagemakers/#how-the-parties-get-to-yes

#BigTech #Oligopolies #Antitrust: "Enshittification isn't just another way of saying "fraud" or "price gouging" or "wage theft." Enshittification is intrinsically digital, because moving all those goodies around requires the flexibility that only comes with a digital businesses. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can't rapidly change the price of eggs at Whole Foods without an army of kids with pricing guns on roller-skates. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can change the price of eggs on Amazon Fresh just by twiddling a knob on the service's back-end.

Twiddling is the key to enshittification: rapidly adjusting prices, conditions and offers. As with any shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye. Tech monopolists aren't smarter than the Gilded Age sociopaths who monopolized rail or coal – they use the same tricks as those monsters of history, but they do them faster and with computers:"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

#AI #BigTech #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Oligopolies: "An annual report on AI progress has highlighted the increasing dominance of industry players over academia and government in deploying and safeguarding AI applications.

The 2023 AI Index — compiled by researchers from Stanford University as well as AI companies including Google, Anthropic, and Hugging Face — suggests that the world of AI is entering a new phase of development. Over the past year, a large number of AI tools have gone mainstream, from chatbots like ChatGPT to image-generating software like Midjourney. But decisions about how to deploy this technology and how to balance risk and opportunity lie firmly in the hands of corporate players."

https://www.theverge.com/23667752/ai-progress-2023-report-stanford-corporate-control

#DigitalPlatforms #BigTech #Oligopolies: "Vili Lehdonvirta is a Professor of Economic Sociology and Digital Social Research at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. He investigates how digital technologies have transformed the organization of the economy and society; more specifically, his objects of study are digital platforms and their effects on society. In 2022, Vili Lehdonvirta published ‘Cloud Empires: How digital platforms are overtaking the state and how we can regain control’ by MIT Press.

The hypothesis underlying the book is bold: the organization of virtual space by digital platforms follows a trajectory similar to the social organization of Western societies in the past centuries. As societies and cities grow and we watch the densification of socio-economic interactions, decentralized and non-institutionalized forms of ‘government’ (e.g., trust-based) become inadequate. Thriving informal markets demand regulatory institutions. In the case of Western societies, this has occurred through the concentration of two functions – rule making and rule enforcing – under the national state. In the virtual space, platform companies have occupied this analogous position."

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2023.2193248

It's a shame that there doesn't appear to be any presence from Canadaland on the Fediverse yet... They are excellent journalists, and their series on Monopolies and Oligopolies of Canada was as revolting as it was fascinating. Highly recommended, even for those outside of Canada.

---

Canada fails yet again to come up with sane and useful legislation and instead gives us C-18.

https://www.canadaland.com/paula-simons-bill-c-18/

#monopolies #oligopolies #canada #canadaland #journalism #news #cndpoli

#AI #BigTech #Oligopolies: "The real risk of A.I. isn't that some super-intelligent computer is going to take over in the future - it's that the humans in the tech industry are going to screw the rest of us over right now."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro130m-f_yk

#AI #BigTech #Oligopolies #LLMs #GenerativeAI: "The MIT research(opens a new window) found that almost 70 per cent of AI PhDs went to work for companies in 2020, compared to 21 per cent in 2004. Similarly, there was an eightfold increase in faculty being hired into AI companies since 2006, far faster than the overall increase in computer science research faculty. “Many of the researchers we spoke to had abandoned certain research trajectories because they feel they cannot compete with industry — they simply don’t have the compute or the engineering talent,” said Nur Ahmed, author of the Science paper.

In particular, he said that academics were unable to build large language models like GPT-4, a type of AI software that generates plausible and detailed text by predicting the next word in a sentence with high accuracy. The technique requires enormous amounts of data and computing power that primarily only large technology companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon have access to. Ahmed found that companies’ share of the biggest AI models has gone from 11 per cent in 2010 to 96 per cent in 2021."

https://www.ft.com/content/e9ebfb8d-428d-4802-8b27-a69314c421ce

#BigTech #Monopolies #Oligopolies #Antitrust #Privacy: "PM: What about the future of antitrust? Are the laws today sufficient to actually do the things that you believe need to be done, or do we need a rewrite, a 21st-century rewrite?

DS: Usually, when people ask that question, they’re actually asking a more pointed question, and they’re asking whether one agrees with the consumer welfare standard or not . . . And that just means, do you agree that the foundational question in antitrust cases should be the consumer’s welfare?

Today, consumers’ welfare means price or quality. And so that question usually means: do you think it should be something different than that? There are lots of things that we could do to make the system more efficient. Five, six, seven years for an antitrust case to conclude in a high-tech market is ridiculous, and ridiculously slow. But the legal standard of focusing on the consumer’s welfare I like, and I don’t think that should change. I think it’s very democratic.

The question is literally, what does the consumer want? So if the consumer values more privacy, then that comes in to construct the antitrust argument. If the consumer values lower price, then that comes in."

https://www.ft.com/content/d9a9af52-4cb5-4bfb-92ed-55e301343ff5

@matthew_d_green No one is. Banks are largely #oligopolies and we have no real choice.