They should, and they should develop home-grown alternatives to these services. It's not that Tiktok shouldn't be banned, it's that Facebook and Twitter should also be banned. Megacorps should to be destroyed up regardless of their nation of origin.
For reference, the largest 15 companies in the world, by:
- Market cap are: Apple, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Saudi Aramco, Meta, Tesla, Broadcom, TSMC, Berkshire Hathaway, Walmart, JPMorgan, Eli Lilly, Visa
- by # of employees: Walmart, Amazon, Foxconn, Accenture, VW, Tata, DHL, BYD, Compass, Jingdong, UPS, Gazprom, Home Depot, JD Logistics, Agricultural Bank of China.
- by earnings: Saudi Aramco, Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, NVIDIA, JP Morgan Chase, Meta, Amazon, ICBC, China Construction Bank, China Pacific Insurance, Exxon Mobil, Agricultural Bank of China, Toyota
A) I'm flexible on the exact numbers here, but a starting point for discussion could be a company with more than 20% market share in a total market above 1% GDP. I admit that finding an effective standard that can withstand legal scrutiny is the hard part here, and we should work on improving it once we agree that megacorporations should be destroyed. I am still looking for a good way to cover vertical integration and other multi-market failure cases, for example.
B)
- Small business should be the driving force in the economy. They are the wellspring of competition and the bastion of the middle class.
- Megacorporations seek to destroy the ability for small businesses to compete with them, leaving buyout or vassalage as their only possible endgame. This shuts down true competitive threats to the megacorporations' dominance. They are trying to pull up the ladder behind them.
- A company should not be so large it can afford to ignore its customers.
- A company should not be so large that it can treat regulatory fines as merely a cost of doing business.
- A company should not be so large that it gets to write the laws and regulations.
- The Monopoly standard is not strict enough. Cartel-like oligopolies cooperate on the important political issues while maintaining a facade of competition.
- Our political systems are not equipped to handle the centralization of such large amounts of wealth. While the economy may not be a zero-sum game, power is, and power follows money.
- ADDED: A company must not be too big to fail.
- ANOTHER: A company should not be so large it can use loss-leaders to bully its way into other markets.
I don't think megacorps should be "destroyed". On the other hand, I do think that a whole lot of those countries grew up taking advantage of mechanisms and data that they seek to exclude others from having by use of their market power and restrictive contracts, and this should be prevented.
E.g. back to Meta, etc: they scraped everything, everywhere for a long time, and it was a big factor that lead to their rise. Now they seek to control all the data in their fiefdom, and use the power of the legal system to enforce EULAs to prevent others from doing the same.
Why? Because economic entities with market power underproduce, overcharge, and fail to innovate and meet their customers' needs. They cause deadweight losses through their inefficiencies. And an excess of concentrated power is just plain scary, whether an individual, a corporation, or a government wields it.
Of course, reducing some of the edge of market power at scale will result in a smaller maximum company size.
Those criteria seem pretty good. All those companies should be broken up and required to make certain divestitures until they no longer to-big-to-fail, oligarchical, anti-competitive etc.
Pretty much every country where it is economically viable to build an alternative has an alternative to these platforms that they aggressively push on their citizens.
Europe may be an exception, but that is what you get when the US is your suzerain.
