[automatic6131]

We need better antitrust and anti-monopoly enforcement. Break up the biggest companies, and then they'll have to actually participate in markets.

[epistasis]

This was Lina Khan's big thing, and I'd argue that our current administration is largely a result of Silicon Valkey no longer being able to get exits in the form or mergers and IPOs.

Perhaps a better approach to anti-monopoly and anti-trust is possible, but I'm not sure anybody knows what that is. Khan was very well regarded and I don't know anybody who's better at it.

Another approach would be a wealth and income taxation strategy to ensure sigmoid income for the population. You can always make more, but with diminishing returns to self, and greater returns to the rest of society.

[vlovich123]

Sorry, how did she stand in the way of IPOs? She was against the larger players providing easy off-ramps to smaller players but I don’t recall anything about IPOs. Indeed, Figma’s IPO is precisely because she undid the pending Adobe / Figma merger if I recall correctly.

[sharts]

a better approach might be to farming out shares to stakeholders. that seems a lot more dynamic and self-correcting than periodic taxation battles after the fact

[CamperBob2]

Khan was largely ineffectual. The current administration, if it can be blamed on SV at all, is more likely to be the result of Harris's insanely ill-timed proposal to tax unrealized capital gains just as election season was kicking into high gear.

[Aloisius]

Samsung lost a large percentage of market share to their competitors in the last couple years, so I'm pretty sure they already have to participate in markets.

Well, assuming they haven't revived the cartel.

[Melatonic]

Yea when I think of DRAM I think of SK Hynix and Micron with Samsung far behind.

[fpoling]

I think a better solution is exponential tax on a company size. I.e. once a company starts to earn above, say, 1 billion, it will be taxed by income by ever increasing amount. Or put it another way, use taxes to break the power law and winner takes effect all into a Gaussian distribution of company sizes.

[AnthonyMouse]

> I think a better solution is exponential tax on a company size. I.e. once a company starts to earn above, say, 1 billion, it will be taxed by income by ever increasing amount.

This is in the right spirit but you want two things to be different about it.

The first is that the threshold for a given industry doesn't make sense as a dollar amount, it makes sense as a market share percentage. Having more than 15% market share should be a thing companies don't want, regardless of whether it's a $100 trillion industry or a $100 million one.

And the second is that taxes create a perverse incentive for the government. You absolutely do not want the government to have even more of a financial incentive to sustain and create more of the companies of that size. What you want is to have fewer of them.

So, what you want is a rule that if a company has more than 15% market share, the entire general public is allowed to sue them into bankruptcy for the offense of market consolidation. Which also removes the problem where they buy off the government prosecutors, because if they commit the offense then anybody can sue them.

[philipkglass]

This would permanently increase DRAM prices. Memory fabricators either earn billions of dollars in income each year or they can't keep going. There are no little Mom and Pop businesses that can do photolithography on leading process nodes.

[Terr_]

Is that revenue, or profit? If revenue, it'll slam certain kinds of high-volume low-profit businesses, and if it's profit then the company will just arrange to have big compensation "expenses" for executives.

The latter would have to be backstopped by taxes on individual income.

[logancbrown]

Ah yes, the same tax mentality that is working great for EU innovation.