<story><title>How the Frightful Five Put Startups in a Lose-Lose Situation</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/technology/frightful-five-start-ups.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pyrale</author><text>People seem to think that Microsoft is a company that at some point sucked at innovation. In fact, the reason Microsoft let a generation of startups blossom was mostly because they got hit by antitrust.&lt;p&gt;Google, FB and Amazon are probably ripe for antitrust, too, but the government won&amp;#x27;t move.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TheRealDunkirk</author><text>Because the rest of them watched and learned from Microsoft&amp;#x27;s mistake. When the antitrust campaign started, Microsoft was giving a paltry $10K to political campaigns. By the time it ended, they were giving $1M a year to BOTH sides, and wound up with a hand-slap. The rest have cozied up to the federal government since the start, and have no fear of antitrust efforts. What they really need now is to be categorized as public services so that they can enjoy some of that sweet, sweet regulatory capture that Verizon, AT&amp;amp;T, and Comcast benefit from.</text></comment>
<story><title>How the Frightful Five Put Startups in a Lose-Lose Situation</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/technology/frightful-five-start-ups.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pyrale</author><text>People seem to think that Microsoft is a company that at some point sucked at innovation. In fact, the reason Microsoft let a generation of startups blossom was mostly because they got hit by antitrust.&lt;p&gt;Google, FB and Amazon are probably ripe for antitrust, too, but the government won&amp;#x27;t move.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>empath75</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s hard to go after the FAANG companies for anti-trust when they all compete with each other in so many ways -- facebook and google have multiple competing services, apple, google and amazon all build consumer hardware, and facebook is dipping it&amp;#x27;s toes in, they all have music services.. Netflix has tons of competitors outside of the big five, but amazon and google both have streaming movie services.  Amazon and Google both have cloud services.&lt;p&gt;Really the only two that have a genuine monopoly are Google in search and Facebook in social networks, and I think perhaps Amazon in online retail.</text></comment>