Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "Breaking Up Google u0026 Amazon Is Possible! w/Andrew Yang" video.
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Breaking up these companies by force is putting your trust in another small group of people. FaceBook and Google were baisically government-backed to start with. I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of their excesses were for the express purpose of causing an outcry so that government will regulate them like a utility, thereby cementing their monopoly position on top of the heap, forever. Government is doing NOTHING to control FaceBook, and FaceBook is losing their ass, because people just up and walked away.
The same thing's gonna happen to YouTube, if they keep up THEIR shit. De-platform all the sincere conservatives and progressives and we'll find other platforms, and YouTube will lose ITS ass.
It's harder to imagine this with Google, itself, it's such a big monolith. But back in the early 20th Century, they couldn't IMAGINE there being more than a handful of networks (radio or television) and that was the excuse for building the highly regulated monolithic "mainstream media" that we ALL know are just front men for big corporations and government. It was because they were SURE that the airwaves would become clogged with so many stations that they had to CONTROL how many people GOT a channel and what they could do with it.
Maybe all it will take is somebody suing Google for various bits and pieces of the data they collect and keep to themselves. Maybe it'll be a small outfit that does online shopping, LOCALLY, to out-compete Amazon. I use my Instacart all the time, and they send a shopper to the grocery store and pick up groceries for me for a small fee. Much less than my time is worth that I'd spend actually going myself, so well worth it to me. If Amazon.com gets fat and bloated and abusive and inefficient, I can see the Instacarts branching out into other products, and slowly replacing Amazon.com in small ways, and a jillion other companies nibbling at the edges.
"Monopoly" in itself isn't bad, unless it starts misbehaving. THAT's when it's bad. And there are market forces that can and will act against it when it starts fucking up, unless you protect the monopoly with government laws and regulations that ALWAYS end up doing more to deny entry into the marketplace by competitors.
Comcast is slow as fuck putting in fiber optic to a LOT of places. Start regulating it as a utility and I know it'll NEVER bring fiber-optic to MY neck of the woods, and they'll make it nearly impossible for anybody else to break in and do it before them. The cable industries already have most of the county officials bought and paid for, to prevent anyone else from coming in. But that's not a problem of monopoly. It's a problem of government bureaucrats abusing their power. And how do you think those big moguls got to BE big moguls? Buying off politicians!
That's not capitalism. It's fascism. Government stepping in where it doesn't belong and controlling shit it has no business controlling. And we fall for it every time, even though we know that the average politician and city and state bureaucrat is LESS trustworthy than the average citizen!
Amazon.com stretching tentacles into print media (WaPo) has an easy solution: Stop buying or reading the Washington Post.
Government regulation always ends up concentrating the power. FAA came along and we went from 100s of independent airlines to a handful of too-big-to-fail companies that the government could then step in a bail out without anybody batting an eye. Same with the big banking bail-out under Obama. We regulate the SHIT out of banks, and no surprise, they all coalesce into one banking mega-beast. The more we do to control them, the bigger and more powerful they get. And it's mainly because people don't understand how the use of government power and how easy it is to control EVERYbody by just bribing or corrupting a handful of assholes in key positions in government, from the City Council on up to Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.
Let these bastards keep abusing their power. As long as government stays out of it, the people are free to buy from somebody else. And they will. When you look at most of the robber baron bullshit of the past, the government never did ANYthing until the public was already turning their backs on the octopi, and that's assuming it wasn't government officials giving the robber barons an unfair advantage at the very beginning. The government "regulators" ended up in the hip pockets of the regulated. That $500,000 fine from the EPA is just the cost of doing business to a BIG company. But it will destroy a small business, and, chances are, the small business wasn't really doing anything wrong, but the big company helped write the regulation that took them down.
You see it in Congress all the time. They pass laws regulating an industry and who do you think they ask HOW to regulate those industries? That's right. The richest lobbyists FROM those industries! Be careful what you ask for! They create an agency to control an industry and then you're surprised when you see a revolving door from the top echelons of that industry to the regulatory agency. Then you scratch your head and wonder how things got so bad, when MAYBE if you kept the fuckin' politicians OUT of it, the PEOPLE would use their purchasing power and their voices to call out the bullshit and to find alternatives.
These monopolies get fat from no competition, and they end up with incompetent twits running the show, and THAT'S what opens them up to better alternatives from competitors. The only way to shut DOWN those competitors is to shield the monopolies WITH government. Why do you think public schools suck so bad? And it's all in the name of curbing the fat cats, and the fat cats cry all the way to the bank.
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With the communications and transportation we have available to us, now, the people have never been more in the driver's seat in all of history, and we're being sold a bill of goods that we are somehow helpless and need more government, right when the biggest drag on the people IS the government. Do you think we, the people, would ever DREAM of dropping bombs on Iraq, Syria, Libya, ....? Think about it. We're entering an era where transparency is every bit as much a sword in the hand of the PEOPLE as it is for the elites who would rule us. This is the biggest problem with progressives. They think they're helpless, when they're NOT.
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