On the heels of Time-Warner (itself a coupled company, if you recall) and America On Line’s $350 billion merger …
Didn’t we used to think monopolies were a bad thing? Why don’t we anymore?
Don’t we remember Teddy Roosevelt, “The Trust-buster,” breaking up monopolies for the betterment of the American people?
Now it’s one ridiculously huge company merging with another, each deal outdoing the last, for more money than the gross national product for all but about 10 countries in the world. Each deal creating more and more of a stranglehold on market share.
Apparently, we’re only interested in breaking up monopolies when it will make things more expensive and inconvenient to customers (Ma Bell comes to mind).
Well, Time-Warner and AOL is not the type of merger that can create a monopoly, because it is considered a vertical integration. That is, TW and AOL don’t really inhabit the same playing field now.
Although our legal system is not geared towards preventing it, these vertical conglomerates can be just as nasty as the old horizontal style. The reason being that once you choose a conglomerate for a given product, it becomes harder and harder to not use other of their products. For example, what do you want to bet that within a few months, the movie reviews section of the AOL start page will primarily feature articles from magazines (owned by TW) that are written about TW productions?
If this is what it takes to subdue Microsoft, so be it.
The day Office Suite becomes affordable or public-domain, I am ready to change my view on Microsoft.
The Time-Warner-Turner-AOL-WhateverTheHellElse is not a monopoly, it’s just a mega-conglomerate.
The Trouble With Mega-conglomerates (hey, that’s a good title for a movie!) is that they can control such a large percentage of the media. The more they keep buying, the more stuff essentially has to meet with Ted Turner’s approval before it goes out to the world.
And not only does that make it more difficult for smaller, independent companies to “make it,” it also makes it harder for unique, different, non-traditional, alternative movies, books, TV shows, newspapers, magazines, and products to ever get seen by the general public. They just can’t compete with the mega-conglomerates.
Essentially, the same group of media “gatekeepers” are acting as the filters for a larger and larger percentage of the media.
We learned all about this stuff in my mass comm classes in college but that was like 2 years ago and I had a lot of coffee this morning so I’m shaking and am having trouble forming complete sentences. Sorry.
Monopolies, if I remember my school days, are not illegal. Trusts are. The difference seems to be in shades of meaning; translation: the decision is as much political as legal.
Anyne know the specifics of anti-trust legislation?
Ted’s only a (IIRC) Senior VP at Time Warner (and it took him a few years to claw that out after the last – Time and Warner – merger), so he’s not the big man in charge in the first place.
But it does seem like someone keeps merging Warner with new companies every time Ted gets too big for his britches…
…but when you get blue, and you’ve lost all your dreams, there’s nothing like a campfire and a can of beans!
Well, beefymeg, sort of. Yes, it is almost certain that AOL will feature content like movie reviews from such TW titles as People. And yes, AOL People (they really should pay me for all this branding work) will review Warner Bros. movies.
But all of that happens now, and somehow competition survives. Book of the Month Club (a TW subsidiary) sells and features books from non TW imprints. HBO (also TW) shows non Warner movies. Heck, TW cable systems even carry Fox programming now, and Ted and Rupert hate each other.
The real story of the past decade generally, and of the internet’s contribution specifically, is the re-emergence of the end-user (you) as a powerful force. If AOL/TW tries to screw you out of some content to which you feel entitled, be assured that Yahoo, Microsoft or someone will make it available. While AOL and TW have powerful synergies to exploit in both content and distribution, the internet’s ability to make content available to you mean that any “monopolistic” advantage will be quite short-lived.
The main regulatory issue in the AOL/TW merger is likely to be in those areas where TW does have monopoly or near-monopoly status – specifically, that big fat coax pipe they run into my home, and to what extent I’ll be able to choose my internet service provider on it when they finally rebuild my neighborhood. AOL/TW has agreed in principle to “open access,” (as opposed to ATT, whose commitment is still tepid on this subject) but details need to be worked out.
I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids!
Sure, Manhattan, I was just being a little fatalistic. It’s part of my charm.
The one thing that concerns me is that there are probably things that we’re missing out on entirely because they never even get to see the light of day. What? I dunno. It just seems a little Big-Brothery.
These may not be monopolies in the strictest, old-fashioned sense of the word, but they most definitely are about concentration of power and capital. They are also most definitely about making it so just a few big boys in any given field can even hope to compete.
We’ve always dealt with that to some extent under our system, but when the very few giants that we thought controlled everything, anyway, begin merging themselves, competition can’t help but suffer.
Hmmmm to get back to the gist of the OP, and avoid the side issues presented…
Yes, trusts were busted because it was felt that competition was necessary in a free-market economy. And current anti-trust law does NOT bust trusts; it is used to avoid anti-competitive business practices, including mergers.
However, in today’s global economy, we begin to realize that local competition may result in inability to compete globally. Thus, having, say, 20 major airlines may be good domestically, but makes it impossible for those airlines to compete globally. So we let them shrink themselves down. Soon, we will have no more than three major domestic airlines that provide international service (sorry, USAirways, but you won’t be one of them).
This explains SOME of the change in governmental philosophy.
Uhm, there are more than a dozen companies that sell some sort of Office Suite - many of them for much less money than Microsoft’s and that offer basic functionality that is just as good (you may not have the scripting capabilities and integration with back office, but almost no one uses that anyway). Among the most popular are Corel’s Office suite (for windows, mac, and linux), Lotus’ Smart Suite (I believe just windows) and Applixware (spelling? its for linux).
Myself I’d recommend the Corel suite. If you look around, you can find it for less than $100, and it understands Word 97 documents (and it understands older word styles ** better ** than word!).
