Traditional antitrust remedies are structurally impossible for cloud platforms
Evidence
In the old days, social democrats had a degree of power over the industrialists because they had the backing of the trades unions and could threaten painful regulation. Today, cloudalists do not fear powerful unions because cloud proles are too weak to form them and cloud serfs do not even consider themselves producers. As for regulation, that has worked by putting a lid on prices or by breaking up cartels. In the Age of Cloud Capital, cloudalists feel safe in the thought that neither makes any sense. Price regulation is irrelevant when the services that consumers need to be protected from are either free or the cheapest on the market already. As for breaking them up, as President Theodore Roosevelt did to Rockefeller when he broke up Standard Oil and other cartels, that was only possible in the old days of terrestrial capital. Standard Oil comprised petrol stations, refineries and fuel transport systems strewn all over North America. Breaking it up into regional oil companies, and encouraging these to compete with one another, was politically hard but technically dead easy. But how does one break up Amazon, Facebook, PayPal or, indeed, Tesla today? — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 668
Categorization
- QUESTION: If physical break-up fails for clouds, what new form of deconcentration is even conceivable? This deserves pressing.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 668
- XREF: connects to: Cooperative platforms cannot compete with entrenched data monopolies — Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, 100; Publicly owned platforms could rival corporate platform control. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 1201
Broader Connections
- Publicly owned platforms could rival corporate platform control.
#responds-to(0.72) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 1201