Comment by azemetre 5 days ago
This is mostly due to not trust busting enough in society. If there were actual competitive markets, not monopolies/oligarchies/monopsonies/cartels, the business world would be completely different.
Either that, or legislate workplace democracy.
Legislation can help in a variety of ways, like taxing digital goods to provide work grants for open source developers. The federal government could create a public payment processor.
There are many things that can be done to help the public flourish, it's very easy if you open up your imagination.
the government doesn't do much except wage war, arrest people, spy on them, and push paper around. everything else is done by contractors, and they're outsourcing an increasing amount of those things they actually do. why would this bottom-bidder contractor or work grant open source developer do a better job than twillio or stripe?
there are many things that can be done to help the public flourish, but the most expedient and obvious one is to stop wasting government money on poorly-managed nonsense created by committee and allow people to regain that lost value in the form of tax decreases.
if your solution to a problem involves increasing taxes for any reason, it's a bad solution.
edit: they maintain national parks. that's pretty cool, but thats like a drop in the bucket for their budget
Depends on what you need but for SMS bandwidth.com was great. They always knew their shit when we spoke to them. They were just not interested in really small accounts. We quickly realized twilio was worst of the major options and built on Nexmo as alternate (which was fine until vonage bought them and didn't really understand the products or market, maybe it's better under ericsson ownership now, don't know left the space).
When I get text spam it almost always originated from twlio or formerly their subsidiary zipwhip.
looking at their wikipedia page they raised $100M decades ago to make that company. it doesn't seem like a good bet to raise money like that just to compete with an already well-known name in the space. maybe you could do it cheaper today, but what's the point? it's probably higher EV to just build something new in a different space and own that market.
i don't think this has to do with trust-busting i think this has to do with there being lower-hanging fruit elsewhere.
but regarding the principle of what you said, especially with tech markets, the government has a vested interest in keeping these companies as monopolistic as possible. a monopoly is always at risk of being taken down by the government, so the government has good leverage over them. with this leverage they can demand all sorts of things from them they otherwise couldn't like warrantless access to user-data and there's nothing the company can do about it. even if the leadership cared about protecting that data. its a much lower administrative cost to abuse one large company that it is to abuse hundreds of more competitive smaller ones.
I tend to disagree. While there are definitely monopolies/oligopoly for every domain, I'm actually constantly impressed with the very long tail of other providers available in that area.
Whenever I am looking for a new solution to a need at work, I would go to sites like g2.com to look at the lists of the most popular ones, and would then typically skim reviews of the top ~10, and more fully evaluate the top ~3. But there are often hundreds of alternatives that I haven't given a chance to, and I know that it's my <s>laziness</s> need to manage my limited time that's promoting this oligopoly, rather than any particular issue with all of those other providers down the list.
I don't see how legislation can help here, other than picking a provider for me. If anything, this is actually a place where I feel that AI tools, and particularly ChatGPT's Deep Research can research a lot more of the alternatives than I as a human would have time for. But that of course has its own set of issues, and I really don't know what the solution is. We no longer live in that world where you just use that provider who lives down the street.