Read on Twitter
There are two really important, globe-spanning, real-estate-occupying, tax-break-soaking-up reasons why these things are not like now: datacenter & (related) warehouse/delivery infrastructure. https://twitter.com/AlecStapp/status/1288524075267248129
Here is where this guy & most of the ppl in that thread are totally wrong, not about abstractions like markets or the future or the past, but about literal reality and how it's currently structured: https://twitter.com/jonst0kes/status/1284948924571279361
All of the companies testifying right now own many square miles of carefully chosen prime physical real estate with genuine physical industrial capacity on them (datacenters, network hardware, warehouses, trucking, etc.).
Furthermore, the trend for all of this is consolidation.
Furthermore, the trend for all of this is consolidation.
With datacenters & delivery (of bits & physical packages), you definitely, absolutely realize economies of scale. It's literally the same thing as the old telephone monopoly -- a giant pile of physical network hardware. But it cloaks itself in "software" so people are blind to it
The idea that there is no tendency to concentration in "giant, globe-spanning compute/storage/networking infrastructure" is trivially false. You can only believe this if you're clueless about the actual tech. https://twitter.com/petergklein/status/1288829459039244289
And just like Google, FB, Apple, AMZN are giant piles of consolidated datacenter & logistics infrastructure dressed up as "software," this article is an entertaining review of crappy tech media punditry dressed up as an anti-antitrust argument. https://truthonthemarket.com/2019/04/01/this-too-shall-pass-unassailable-monopolies-that-were-in-hindsight-eminently-assailable/
In 2019, Google spent over $25B in capex, mostly on datacenters. Datacenters are physical plant infrastructure, just like a manufacturing facility. https://www.lightreading.com/services/cloud-services/google-doubles-capex-to-$2546b-mostly-on-data-centers-and-offices/d/d-id/749252
Google has been spending many billions a year on datacenter hardware for over a decade. It has bought a ton of real estate and physical industrial capacity with all of that money. It gets incredible economies of scale from all of that centralized, consolidated infrastructure.
Here is a random article I googled up on how difficult it is to select the right patch of real estate for building a multibillion dollar datacenter. I have a bunch of PDFs on this topic on my hard drive. It's not trivial, & location is key. https://www.areadevelopment.com/data-centers/Data-Centers-Q1-2015/data-center-location-design-strategies-2728261.shtml
This is from Intel's whitepaper on how it selects datacenter sites. Note not only the role of local taxes & regulation, but other public goods like roads & airports. These datacenter monopolies are government-supported.
Google, FB, Amazon, & every other company with a datacenter is doing arbitrage. They're literally turning public infrastructure & tax breaks into profits. They can do this because they are very, very, very large.
