That means I am responsible for all mass shootings. Nooooo!
And yet they already exist.
I apologize. I wasn’t intending to accuse you of anything, and I’m sorry if you took it that way - hopefully that was sarcasm - but without context (and this being text) I’ll take the safer road of not assuming.
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Non-compete agreements are already unenforceable in CA. People have speculated that this is why silicon valley is there and not in Massachusetts.
Google doesn’t keep its engineers with non-competes, they get them and keep them by paying above market rates (sometimes well above.) Some companies don’t even hire in the Bay Area anymore, because they can’t retain people, since Google is always hiring just up the street, and very few other companies can afford to compete with what they pay.
Also, there are already other functional search engines, with effectively zero cost or effort to users switching. People don’t switch because google’s is better, not because of monopoly effects. I wouldn’t say that Google even has a monopoly in search, in any way the government could reasonably get involved in. They have a monopoly in online advertising.
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On noncompetes…holy shit when did that happen and how did I miss it.
I am probably going to try to delete my posts later today…
On the monopoly, given the above failure, I am NOT going to rely on the technical argument that if Google has enough market share in search, then they are a monopoly…
And I’m not going to dive into the advertising monopoly because holy shit how did I miss the non compete thing!!!
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Monopoly is intrinsic to capitalism for probably two reasons.
- Property is too widely defined (ex. intellectual ‘property’).
- There’s no method to disperse property to the widest number of people.
The first point is something that’s happened over the last few centuries which has led to further enclosure of commons whether it be land or ideas. This is something that I think can be fixed with good legislation and enforcement. Specifically, a restriction of what is defined as property and abolishing arbitrary categories for property such as IP would lead to more dispersal of material wealth as there wouldn’t be any benefit to horde ideas or the products of ideas.
As to the second point, the lack of any natural dispersal of wealth or property in capitalism is something that leads to monopolization as the power of compounding interest bulldozes any firm that tries to counter it (firms that don’t profit seek to their highest potential). Any firm that leaves literally money on the table will inevitably be undercut on price by larger firms who can take a price drop or buy out the smaller business or even litigate against said business. This leads to buy outs and mergers which concentrates the wealth. This problem has no easy solution. I think even legislation would be inevitably repealed or diminished whether on writing or enforcement.
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