When I talk about how we should fight tech monopolies, I often make the point that tech companies used to grow by making things, but now they grow by buying them.
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For example Google created 1.5 amazing products (a search engine and a Hotmail clone) and then bought a bunch of companies. Its in-house products - G+, Sidewalk Labs, smartwatches, Loon - are boondoggles, vanity projects and failures.
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A couple weeks ago, a Twitter commenter challenged me on this, asking why Google's excellence when it comes to SCALE didn't qualify as "innovation"? In some ways, making a hit product is the easy part - keeping it running once it's a hit is the hard part.
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I have a lot of sympathy for this argument. I'm a recovering systems administrator. I know how hard scale is. I remember when Youtube was all "buffering..." errors. Hell, I remember when Blogger crashed on a near-daily basis.
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Google's expertise in running reliable services at scale is humbling and astounding.
But it's not enough. The argument is complex, so I wrote an essay about it:
eff.org/deeplinks/2020…
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But it's not enough. The argument is complex, so I wrote an essay about it:
eff.org/deeplinks/2020…
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The short version: doing things well at scale comes with the territory for monopolists. Standard Oil pumped a lot of oil and the Rail Trust moved a lot of rolling stock. If being good at scale gets you a pass from anti-monopoly law, then anti-monopoly law is meaningless.
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What's more, much of Google's expertise at scaling (as well as that of other Big Tech, from Apple and Microsoft to Facebook) is the result of still more acquisitions - from server companies to cluster-management companies.
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In a world of vigorously enforced anti-monopoly rules, those companies would be standalones, selling products to anyone who wanted them - not allowing monopolists to better manage the nascent competitors they've gobbled up.
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