The best move would be to prevent giants from having so many hands in so many jars. The lines are hard to draw, but a good heuristic would be if they're stepping across industry boundaries.
Commoditizing your complement is great if you're engaged in war tactics against a few rivals, but when it's broadly applied to everything it's essentially a scorched earth campaign that has massive negative externalities for the entire capitalist ecosystem.
As an example and a prediction of the outcome of this behavior: in a decade there will be few movie studios left because Amazon, Apple, and Google ate them up so that they can keep eyeballs on their platforms.
Things we deal with today: browser monoculture, unilateral decision making, and erosion of ad blocking. Devices you can't repair that are the only way you can access certain sets of services. Etc.
If these were separate companies, the experience would be top notch for each piece, and user rights would be respected.
The simplest approach I've read so far was Warren's proposal to split those that manage markets from those that compete in said market.
Specifically, Amazon can run a giant online marketplace, but it shouldn't be able to put it's own products in that marketplace. Being able to both control the market and provide goods and services within the market is a recipe for disaster for everyone that isn't in control.
How about applying that to stores in the state of MA, CVS can't sell house brands, and the grocery stores can't do it either. Let's see how it works there first, before doing it at the national level?
I don't see much of an issue with any company having lots of entry points into different industries. I see more of the problem being tight control over vertically integrated aspects of the supply chain.
I'd prefer to see rules limiting companies from creating products in 2 consecutive/complementary components of a supply chain unless one of the products is completely open for 'swapping' out with something else. This allows companies to still benefit from vertical integration if they don't commercialize one side of things. But as you said, it's hard to draw the lines, cause you could define a supply chain in a ton of different ways.
The best move would be to prevent giants from having so many hands in so many jars. The lines are hard to draw, but a good heuristic would be if they're stepping across industry boundaries.
Commoditizing your complement is great if you're engaged in war tactics against a few rivals, but when it's broadly applied to everything it's essentially a scorched earth campaign that has massive negative externalities for the entire capitalist ecosystem.
As an example and a prediction of the outcome of this behavior: in a decade there will be few movie studios left because Amazon, Apple, and Google ate them up so that they can keep eyeballs on their platforms.
Things we deal with today: browser monoculture, unilateral decision making, and erosion of ad blocking. Devices you can't repair that are the only way you can access certain sets of services. Etc.
If these were separate companies, the experience would be top notch for each piece, and user rights would be respected.