This is a really good and important article that I’m currently pondering.
I’m not at all ready to concede that we messed up by opposing SOPA and PIPA, but I will admit that there is a tiny club that makes most of the money on content and creators are not in it.
I don’t think we’d be better off if large copyright holders had won that fight. I don’t even have think creators would be better off.
But libertarians have yet to offer a real answer to the fact that efficient markets enable concentrations of power and illiberality that rivals that of governments. All they have is a limp gesture toward “innovation” and some dubious historical analogies.
People who offer that market forces can just cook up an alternative to FB or Google don’t understand how economies of scale work.
Economies of scale matter on the supply side as infrastructure gets cheaper at size (so fixed delivery costs go way down) and on the demand side as a massive player can offer an advertiser a bigger audience and more data per dollar.
My point is that you just can’t compete with a company that operates its own data centers if you can’t afford one of your own, which rules out startups. This is classic vertical integration of the type that has always plagued capitalism
The answer has always been to break it up after the rent seeking starts to get unbearable. That’s the answer for Big Tech, as well. These aren’t just software companies, they’re datacenter companies.
And as I’ve always pointed out on here datacenters are a classic resource play. They turn power and critical real estate into compute and storage. You can’t just put one anywhere. They have strict geographic constraints.
