America has a monopoly problem

This is brilliant. I recently wrote in to my senator about net neutrality. His reply was a breathtakingly convoluted justification of not regulating companies like Comcast because antitrust laws would take care of it. I've never felt so insulted.

Monopolies are a natural phenomenon in capitalism. I'm not sure why people glorify capitalism as much, given the fact that competition is impossibly hard in many areas, and that to reduce costs, and remove competitive pressure, companies tends to consolidate, i.e. reduce competition. Neither socialism nor capitalism makes sense today. We need a totally new system, but it's really hard to make a dent into the status quo, which is well-entrenched, and would resist any change!

America has a corruption problem. The ability for companies to vertically integrate and essentially make smaller businesses non-competitive can only occur when you don&#x27;t have to pay the taxes your smaller competitors have to pay and don&#x27;t have to obey the same laws your competitors have to obey.<p>We have a systemic corruption problem (manifested in lobbying) coupled with greed on scales we&#x27;ve never seen before. Everything else is just a symptom of that problem.

From the article<p><i>Firms like Microsoft led in the innovation in creating new barriers to entry. How could one compete with a browser provided at a zero price.</i><p>I think what happened to Microsoft is the perfect example of how to overcome a monopoly.<p>20 years ago, everyone thought that Microsoft’s monopoly was unassailable. Google barely existed, Facebook didn’t exist, Amazon was a bookseller and Apple was basically bankrupt.<p>20 years ago, Netflix had a few million DVD customers and AOL was the largest ISP.<p>Who knows what will happen in the next 20 years?

&gt; <i>We have become a rent-seeking society</i><p>It just dawned on me while reading the article that this accurately describes the shift from licensed software to SaaS that has been happening in the past decade.

America has a capitalism problem. What the article fails to address is that the root cause is really capitalism. Under capitalism wealth and power always concentrates, which in the case of businesses, that eventually means bad monopolies. Under a representative democracy that also means politics will always be corrupted because those with money and power will always be benefited by controlling politics, and they have the money and power to do so (who owns the news media? who can afford to buy off politicians, whether they start corrupt or not?). While the power of monopolies ebbs and flows as those without capital get angrier, the monopolies will always come back because that&#x27;s what capitalism does.<p>Monopolies are not inherently bad. It&#x27;s entirely possible to have a monopoly and have a great thing that everyone likes and is happy with and which keeps innovating. But under capitalism the primary incentive is the accumulation of capital which rarely lines up with creating something great long term.

Capitalism on a smaller scale is broken. Once you have achieved a monopoly they become entrenched in the socio-political system.<p>On a global scale, where laws can&#x27;t protect I.P. we will see innovation coming out from new sources. If America is happy to stagnate, we will see India and China leading the future.

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American has an optimism problem. Or rather, optimism seems to be unequally distributed. Feels like we need some leadership to raise our eyes to all the opportunities out there, and how we can get to a better spot.

Peter Thiel (who works with YC) will tell you that monopolies are good for the world.