from Hacker News

A New Antitrust Doctrine

by timsneath on 6/12/23, 6:44 PM with 13 comments

• by remich on 6/12/23, 10:28 PM

  Dude seems to have a weird personal vendetta against Lina Khan.

  I detest most private equity and am somewhat curious to read his thoughts on it, but I tuned out after the like fifth instance of high-school-girl gossip mongering about the FTC under Khan.

  Also, it's sort of weird to make efficacy judgments about cases brought by the DOJ/FTC in the current revived antitrust era when they are forced to climb such a mountain of adverse precedent generated by the Law & Economics and Chicago School movements over the last 40-50 years. Hayek's intellectual children have been digging a moat inside the judiciary and private practice at least since Bork wrote The Antitrust Paradox.

  Put simply, if your goal is to upend the entire paradigm for evaluating competition harms, your arguments probably aren't going to be able to be regarded as very strong under the existing frameworks.

• by throwaway9274 on 6/12/23, 9:25 PM

  The line about the Meta/Google ad duopoly fading is false.

  The graph in the link just depicts the growth of TikTok, a one time event.

  Not even the same market, since they offer largely non-substitutable vertical video ads.

  Whole piece is rather casually misleading.

• by clairity on 6/12/23, 10:09 PM

  tl;dr: the author wants antitrust action to focus on private equity rather than tech (and oh look, he runs a tech consultancy!). the evidence presented isn't entirely wrong (at least the parts i skimmed), but it's certainly highly selective, in service of reaching a desired conclusion. the digression into different schools of thought on antitrust is a waste of time, to put it mildly (and it is two posts mashed together, contrary to the author's explicit disclamation).

  antitrust is really simple in my view: companies should principally be in one line of business[0] as that's the most efficient configuration for the economy as a whole. some of those businesses will be larger than others as a natural consequence of the given industry (e.g., capital-intensive businesses like aerospace), but no business should be larger than it needs to be (in the long-term; short-term dynamism is "inefficient" but promotes longer-term optimality).

  that's because companies that are too big inevitably develop internal inefficiencies (e.g., bureaucratizing and politicizing) and suffer from diseconomies of scale, like the coordination problem (the topic of mythical man month). they also develop external inefficiencies, like looking for regulatory leverage via lobbying, arbitraging labor across jurisdictions, or settling into rent-seeking. right-sized companies, those that must focus first and foremost on market competition, don't have time for that sort of bullshit.

  [0]: the hard part being the delineation, but it basically boils down to any business that can remain a going concern without positive externalities helping them along (which is not consolidated businesses in the US, including all the major telecoms, defense, education, biotech, oil & gas, etc.). private equity plays in all of these industries but it's silly to think that it's PE that is causing poor economic outcomes, so much so that we solely target PE for antitrust action.

• by LatteLazy on 6/13/23, 7:13 AM

  I like an advertising monopoly: it means higher prices for less advertising (good) and more money for services to the actual population (good) and the high cost means ads I see are more likely to actually tailor to my interests (good). Why would we want a more "efficient" market for this? So we could pay a nano penny less for products we won't be buying anyway and in exchange Gmail, Facebook and every other free site becomes unusable as 98% of the screen is an ad? No Thanks.

• by drewcoo on 6/13/23, 4:55 AM

  Far to dismissive of Brandeis and the ilk.

  All the kids who today revere RBG as some kind of demigod with accompanying action figures should know more about Brandeis . . . an actual leftist, populist justice, starkly unlike RBG.