Senate Are big tech companies building monopolies

You have Google, Facebook and others buying up small firms that are basically the owners of patents and interesting ideas and products like Oculus. Overpaying by the billions for these companies. But is the real reason to create a monopoly in the future. Basically it would as if IBM had bought out Microsoft forty years ago so they could put Microsoft on all their machines and thus conquer the market. Instead we had Microsoft license it product and make money as company. Is Facebook and google and amazon buying out small companies to build a future monopoly?

 

If they haven't bought Boardwalk yet, then I'm not worried.

Edit: Yikes, didn't see this was a beezel thread.

 

Sorry, I'm not fluent in 'beezel'... you're asking if all the major players in the tech industry have a joint business plan to merge in the future to create a monopoly?

The answer is 'no'. I worry that you had to ask the question. Have you been reading about lizard people and new world order conspiracies?

 

What I am trying to say is that Google is buying up every single smaller player so that their wont be another Microsoft. Because instead of licensing their product to all platforms its restricted to only what the parent company demands. The payoff is going to the investors of the small companies which is usually a small number and of course those who gave them seed money are getting paid back ten fold. Its like you invest in a small tech company not so that it will become a good company but to be simply be bought out by google for an obscene amount of money.

 

beezel, that post is a shambles even by your standards. If you're a real person, please take your meds. If you're an AI bot and someone's tweaked your algorithms, they need to know that the output is even less coherent than usual.

 

beezel you've been watching silicon valley on hbo, havent you?

 

If we get past laughing at beezel, there may be some salvageable discussion here. Several major outlets, including both the New Yorker and Radiolab, have done some pretty thorough investigative reporting about the way in which Amazon's practices are potentially harmful to the publishing industry as a whole, for instance. Given, that's not really what beezel was talking about at all, but never mind. Is anyone else familiar with this and/or interested in discussing it?

 

I thought Beezel was talking about internet porn.

 

Alright guys, if you agree then stop "liking" my post and actually discuss it. Now do you all see what the problem with these "innovations" is?

 

While I'm not familiar with the New Yorker pieces, it's been on my radar for some time that Amazon treats its suppliers like slime, whether they're in the book industry or otherwise.

Amazon entered into a contract with Toys R Us to sell Toys R Us toys, games, and baby products on the Amazon Web site. To do the deal, Toys R Us had to shut down its own Web site. Over time, Toys R Us complained that Amazon was selling toys from competing companies on the Amazon Web site. Toys R Us said that violated their agreement with Amazon and sued them. A judge agreed. Not only did she agree, but she had a number of damning things to say about the integrity of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his company. In a 3/15/06 Wall Street Journal article, Lee Gomes said, “Time’s Man of the Year for 1999, one of the Web’s legendary entrepreneurs, behaving like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar? Jeff Bezos, say it isn’t so. Alas, it is, at least according to a New Jersey judge.” On 3/2/06, New Jersey Superior Court judge Margaret Mary McVeigh declared Toys R Us the winner of the lawsuit and invalidated the contract between Amazon and Toys R Us. According to Gomes, “The judge portrayed the company as being secretly contemptuous of its business partners and slippery, bordering on mendacious, in dealing with the court.” Associated Press said the judge called Amazon executives, “obstinate, arrogant, and even childish.”

The court decided that the contract made Toys R Us the exclusive seller of toys on the Amazon Web site. Bezos testified that such a thing never occurred to him. When Toys R Us’s lawyer showed him a contrary email in court, the judge wrote in her opinion, “in a rather childlike fashion, he tried to convince the court that he was unaware there was a problem.” The judge also said Bezos’ memory was selective and that he changed the definitions of words depending on whether he was talking to Toys R Us when they signed the contract or the court. “Mr. Bezos’ understanding of the exclusivity granted to [Toys R Us] would not be any different than what Jeff Bezos wished exclusivity to be.” The judge all but called Bezos a liar saying, “This court has no doubt his knowledge and understanding went deeper than revealed.” Gomes said the court’s decision is a how-to guide for violating a contract.

The judge said Amazon stopped adhering to the agreement very gradually in an apparent attempt to prevent Toys R Us from noticing or having much to complain about at any given time. But both Toys R Us and the court saw the cumulative effect and Amazon did not get away with it. Gap, Inc., Circuit City, and Drugstore.com previously got fed up with Amazon and ended their partnerships with them. Another Wall Street Journal article on 3/3/06 by Mylene Mangalindan quotes Forrester Research analyst Sucharita Mulpru as saying, “There are now a lot of retailers who are very, very skeptical of any attempt to get into bed with [Amazon]. Their terms [for retailers] aren’t as favorable as they’d like them to be, and Amazon is known to be a tough negotiator.”
The Associated Press article said Amazon is also in trouble with many on Wall Street because it is too secretive for a publicly-traded company. David Garrity, director of research at Hapoalim Securities USA Inc. said, “Jeff’s gotta be a stand-up guy in the eyes of not only potential business partners, but investors.” Apparently Mr. Garrity never heard the old saying, “You can’t teach a young, dot.com billionaire new tricks.”

On the other hand, I'm not terribly worried about Amazon gaining a monopoly over anything, mainly because they are a doomed anachronism, even if they don't know it yet. Amazon makes nothing (except perhaps Kindles). It is a middleman: first cousin to all the various middleman bookstores that got wiped out because people could go to the Internet to stop getting ripped off on price. Just because Amazon is an Internet middleman doesn't make it any less doomed, because the Internet changed and is still changing everything about how commerce works on this planet. The Internet allows suppliers and customers to trade directly - no middleman required. And a middleman only survives on the margin between how much they can get a manufacturer to price their goods at and how much they can get a customer to pay for it.

A manufacturer necessarily cannot be undercut on price by a middleman, and consequently, the manufacturer (or author, if they're self-published) is the best price you'll get on an item. As time goes on, more people are going to wake up to that - or, eventually, someone like Google will come up with a search engine that allows you to more efficiently track down and trade with the manufacturer (or author) of an item. When that happens, Amazon is done. The fact that self-publishing authors are silly enough to sell their stuff through Amazon sometimes boggles my mind.

 

"Competition is sin." - John D. Rockefeller, one of the frontmen for the New World Order. And, unless I'm mistaken, you'll see the CEOs of all those companies (Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc.) at Bilderberg meetings.

 

"We are the New World Order..."

 

Since Justin Bieber's in that picture, I'm inclined to believe it.

 

"I didn't actually say that, you should stop mindlessly regurgitating blogs." - John D. Rockefeller

"And if you attribute it to me, I'mma cap a *****." - Mark Twain.

 

Pretty sure he didn't say that.

 

You don't say.

 

That is the monopolistic practice of amazon. Google and facebook is doing a slightly different way. By buying up all the little guys before they get big then the big guys have complete control over everything. Oculus is a company that is over valued and young. But with Facebook at the helm no one else can use the platform for what they want. Unless it runs whatever Facebook says. Think of this, google self driving cars may only have access to google map quest and whatever company wants to pay what google demands. Its similar to what Netflix is faced with. In order to have a decent product, Netflix has to pay Comcast to get a reliable service to its customers.

 

There was the Internet in the 1800s? I guess Solomon was right when he wrote "there is no new thing under the sun"!







By the way, if you thought I was serious there, I wonder about your sanity.

 

Very interesting, Saint. I was previously unaware of their dealings with Toys 'R Us, but this certainly adds a new dimension. I'll see if I can track down the original article. As for the New Yorker piece I referenced, you can find it: Here

I wouldn't rest so easily on this logic. Authors are not quite like craftsmen or farmers who simply need help bringing their work to market. I would argue that their manuscripts are instead an unfinished product in most cases. Thus, the publisher has real value added to the final product. It's not just about printing out all the pages and slapping some binding glue on it. Editors are able to work with authors to help them refine their product by spotting errors and pressing them to more fully realize their ideals. Many very talented writers nonetheless attest to the importance of their editorial relationships in this regard. This is a role that your "cut out the middle man" approach allows no one to play in systematic fashion, which Amazon's data-mining approach cannot acknowledge conceptually, even as it systematically destroys any meaningful practitioners.

That besides, I think you've already been beaten. Amazon increasingly has a stranglehold on book distribution. In short, it is (or is making aggressive moves to become) the search engine that allows readers to efficiently track down content they want, and for its manufacturers to offload their product. Alternative methods don't guarantee enough exposure to potential customers. All of this makes it very hard for some new upstart to supplant it.

 

A lot of these smaller companies start with the intent of being bought out by a larger company. Being bought and grafted on to another company usually means that they'll have more financial backing to continue with what they're doing. This has been going on for decades in technology and isn't a new thing. Hell, most of Microsoft's products have origins in software created by other software publishers. Microsoft made a name for itself by being very good at knowing what software would bring in business and then acquiring the software or the publisher. This isn't monopalistic at all in that there are plenty of other players in the hardware/software industry and they all have very different sets of goals: some want to be bought out while others want to grow on their own and eventually do the buying out of other companies.

Also, Microsoft all but threw themselves at IBM to buy Windows. IBM declined to buy it or Microsoft so Bill Gates and his crew struck out on their own. After a few years (and plenty of long, regret filled nights inspecting the bottoms of countless bottles of bourbon), IBM decided to try and compete with MS by creating their own operating system called OS2 - it failed. Microsoft had a head start in marketing their stuff and had a variety of programs available while OS2 didn't have nearly as many programs or support from hardware/software vendors. IBM realized that they had failed and went back to the bourbon and cheap hookers while Bill Gates sat atop his pile of cash doing lines of coke off of expensive hookers and deciding the next small business' software or hardware he liked enough to buy out.

In short: this isn't anything new, it isn't nearly as bad as beez is making it out to be, and beez really hasn't much of a clue as to what he is talking about here - as usual.