Monopsony antitrust

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quantus
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Re: Monopsony antitrust

Post by quantus »

Jonathan wrote:
Mon Aug 03, 2020 6:56 pm
I don't buy that for a hot minute. If it's really impossible for American companies to compete domestically with global behemoths of that scale, then the US government should institute capital controls and protectionist trade policies. However, I firmly believe that antitrust action only increases competition. Organizations in a competitive market will deliver better results than organizations in a monoculture.
In general I agree with you. The problem is that I really don't trust the government to throw up effective controls or protections. We've really only seen Trump throw up major protectionist policies, but he's throwing them around willy-nilly rather than in the targeted manner they should be used (and Trump is a mess in too many other respects). He also isn't getting the rest of the world, or at least Europe on board with similar protections. We have a lot of leverage as the worlds largest economy, but it would be better with an even larger share of the world's GDP behind these moves. I do hope that some of the measures against China are continued under the next President though, and we can get help from the rest of the world, and we can get back to cleaning up our own economic. China's the biggest, but not the only problem, and really none of those others are being addressed either.

I also don't think that monopolies should be detected by the public through opinion polls. That's the government's job. Yeah, they're slow and it takes people to point out to them that there are problems. If it's getting to 50% or 60% of the population, we have a bigger problem, where the government just isn't working, like we have right now.
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Jonathan
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Re: Monopsony antitrust

Post by Jonathan »

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/202 ... -years/#p3
Klobuchar's bill would shift that burden in the other direction for businesses that already have a dominant market position. Those companies—which in tech would absolutely include firms such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook—would proactively have to demonstrate that a merger would not "create an appreciable risk of materially lessening competition," in addition to not creating a monopoly or monopsony.

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