The antitrust paradox

What Hacker News says

1. mcmcmcDec 2024
   Sure, it’s great from the consumer perspective in the short run. But how much does needing a free tier to attract customers raise the barrier to entry for the market? The only companies that can compete are those with existing infrastructure and revenue streams that can subsidize their losses. Even ZIRP couldn’t counteract that. There is a reason that predatory pricing is illegal.

   Would strongly recommend Lina Khan’s “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox”

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2. bb86754Mar 2024
   If you're genuinely interested in this below are a couple things you could read to help get some background. Its actually a pretty fascinating history.

   Judging by your phrasing, your interpretation of antitrust stems from Robert Bork and has been the mainstream thought for a long time. Read The Antitrust Paradox by him to see how we got here and why the courts have acted how they have for the past 40 years.

   The current chair of the FTC, Lina Khan, was actually an academic prior to working for the government and has a long paper trail of how she interprets the law. In short (and extremely oversimplified), it modernizes the Brandeis interpretation that bigness is bad for society in general, regardless of consumer pricing. EX: If Apple were a country its GDP would surpass the GDPs of all but four nations. They argue this is bad flat out.

   Can't say it was the only cause, but Khan's paper, Amazon's Antitrust Paradox - note the reference to Bork's book - is partially what resparked a renewed interest in antitrust for the modern era if you want to check it out.

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3. cratermoonJul 2023
   Amazon's Antitrust Paradox is definitely worth a read. <https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...>
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4. an_opabiniaAug 2020
   I don't know, it would be great if any of these people had bothered talking to a lawyer or an anti-trust scholar, a provenance that would matter a lot to understanding this issue.

   For example, almost everyone here will learn more reading "Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox" (https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...) to understand why Epic set things up the particular, exact way they did - because they got Apple to take down a store page that clearly gave consumers the option to buy something at a lower price.

   If you don't want to be prejudiced by educational background, which is reasonable, you can easily tell if a take on the Apple v. Epic case is well-informed by simply Ctrl+F searching "consumer welfare." Additionally if the writer makes the distinction between the legal realism (what will happen, which is that Epic will relist but not sell IAP on the App Store anymore, and the outcome of the case will be non-precedent-forming), the legalism (what should happen, which is that Apple is reducing consumer welfare), and what you hope will happen, which surprisingly, for Ben Evans, I guess Apple makes even more money?

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5. nabnobFeb 2019
   I agree with some of the points being made in this article, but there's definitely better resources on this topic.

   The paper mentioned in the article, "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox", is very thorough and easy to read even for someone (like me) who doesn't have a background in economics.

   The key point made in that paper is that modern antitrust legislation only looks at price when determining whether a monopoly is harming the consumer, and doesn't consider scale or the effects on the overall market and competition.

   >This Note argues that the current framework in antitrust—specifically its pegging competition to “consumer welfare,” defined as short-term price effects—is unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy. We cannot cognize the potential harms to competition posed by Amazon’s dominance if we measure competition primarily through price and output. Specifically, current doctrine underappreciates the risk of predatory pricing and how integration across distinct business lines may prove anticompetitive. These concerns are heightened in the context of online platforms for two reasons. First, the economics of platform markets create incentives for a company to pursue growth over profits, a strategy that investors have rewarded. Under these conditions, predatory pricing becomes highly rational—even as existing doctrine treats it as irrational and therefore implausible. Second, because online platforms serve as critical intermediaries, integrating across business lines positions these platforms to control the essential infrastructure on which their rivals depend. This dual role also enables a platform to exploit information collected on companies using its services to undermine them as competitors.

   Even though I'm a software engineer, I'm skeptical of claims that technology can help fix social, economic, or environmental problems. I support green technology, but they're not a panacea. In articles pushing green tech and sustainable energy, there seems to be this implicit assumption that we can maintain our current standard of living in a "sustainable" way. Solar panels and electric cars aren't going to prevent climate catastrophe if only 5% of people can afford them. Rather than relying on individual consumers to make ethical choices (opting into living sustainably) we need drastic changes at a state-wide level (so that choosing not to be sustainable is opt-out).

   >Income inequality can be solved by educating or retraining workers for the high-tech jobs of the future.

   This statement doesn't make any sense. If you increase the number of software engineers, the average wage will decrease.

   Edit: Forgot to mention that tech is absolutely automating away a large number of jobs.

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6. nielsbotSep 2026
   Clinton was a neoliberal. Not an expert, but I thought for a long time the vision of anti-trust being democracy-preserving (or at least preventing corporations from being able to compete with the government for power) was replaced by a view "consumer harm" was the only concern of anti-trust law. Basically focusing on pricing competition.

   Read more about SCOTUS justice Robert Bork who ushered in the modern anti-trust viewpoint.

   E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox

   > Bork argues that the original intent of antitrust laws as well as economic efficiency makes consumer welfare and the protection of competition, rather than competitors, the only goals of antitrust law.

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