I’d like to start this off by apologising for writing this down this late. I read the post as soon as you published it and sent to me, and I haven’t gotten around to putting down my thoughts — until now. Okay, let’s start from the beginning.

Insoluble Salts and Insolvable Precipitates

I have taken the first step and accepted that inequality exists in many forms (as per your directive), but I still think you’re looking at it wrong. I’d have been a little more accommodating of the idea if the post was titled and themed, “Solving Inequality” and not “Monopoly”. That’s because I do not know that “Monopoly” in the sense you have described it needs to be “solved” in the first place, or “Inequality”, in the way you have suggested.

The sense I got after reading your article a few times is that the point of view being promoted is populist, bordering on socialist. And like a perfectly socialist society, it is impossible to maintain for very long. Here’s why:

Competition? What Competition?

…take a second to realise that very few entrepreneurs are dumb (or should I say, brave) enough to compete with Apple, Google or Unilever…It’s in your best interest to leave the competition to be between the giants that exist there already.

This is not always true, and competition does not always mean a head on collision. I think the best way to describe this is to place Snapchat and Apple side by side. Going by customer sentiment, the iPhone’s biggest selling point is its camera. Thing is, that camera’s utility diminishes every time you take a photo and it gets saved to (limited) memory. After a while, you’re forced to delete some or upload them to some cloud service for external storage. This adds an extra layer of complexity to the consumption and sharing process.

Now, if only someone made an always-connected camera that automatically pushes your photos to the cloud and lets the people you care about consume them without any extra input from you. Hint: that’s what Snapchat has become. But how are they competing? Time spent using Snapchat’s camera is time NOT spent using Apple’s camera, even though you ARE using Apple’s camera (hardware). Apple provides the infrastructure that makes it all possible, but Snapchat gets all the brand value and mindshare out of it².

Lesson? Small companies can “compete” with huge ones by leveraging on the pain points the consumers face³ and changing the game being played entirely⁴. That’s why I think the entire premise is wrong. We do not need many small companies making phones in 2016. They will not do it better than Apple, and there’s no point wasting everybody’s time. Plus, when you enable all this in the name of “competition”, you will get Android-level fragmentation. *barf*

When monoliths are not monoliths

Companies & individuals interact with the football network in very varied forms; from club ownership (Real madrid) to kit deals (Adidas), to jersey sponsorships (Fly Emirates) to stadium branding (SportsPesa), to match ball sponsorship, to stadium construction.

FIFA is NOT a company (I think) hence, this gives more room/opportunities for companies to latch on to the network created by the FIFA community.

The part you missed out was that none of those things you listed there is there BECAUSE FIFA is not a company (even that point is debatable, because FIFA generates revenue and makes profit — but…that’s not why we’re here).

You‘re referring to standards organisations, protocols, governing bodies and governments as homogenous wholes which will go on to “regulate” and provide a framework on which many other companies can build their own products. This is terribly naive for a number of reasons, the most prominent of which is that governments are not indivisible units. They are made up of people, and people have interests which will determine where they will pitch their tents. Plus, organisations like that are known to be slow and unfit to determine humanity’s next steps. That’s why the big companies which were crushing it 20 years ago are not the same ones doing so today.

Example: if you left it to Microsoft, everyone would use a PC, and the mobile revolution (and the other good things it brought, like the economics of scale that lowered the prices of smartphone parts, which in turn is enabling things like VR & wearables today) will NEVER have seen the light of day. Err…I don’t feel very good about letting anyone person or organisation or governing body or government be the arbiter of what’s next.

Pipes and platforms

I like to place companies in one of these two categories. Pipes are business models that enable a linear flow of value from a producer to the consumer. Platforms enable interactions between value producers and consumers, taking a little off each transaction to pay the bills. Pipes can become Platforms, like Amazon starting out by selling books and then morphing into a marketplace, and Platforms can become Pipes, like Covenant University letting students sell items, then clamping down on them and becoming a provider, themselves. No shade intended.

I suspect that the solution you’re trying to describe is a platform that enables other producers to build themselves up into solid businesses. The thing is that the “centralised monopolies” you want to break up are mostly ALREADY platforms. Uber, to use your example, does not employ drivers and let people hail them. If you look at each driver/partner as an entrepreneur, then Uber is already the kind of organisation you tried to describe. If my assumption is wrong, and you want Uber to break its OWN core operations down into smaller bits, then I have to strongly disagree.

The Uber ecosytem has a lot more functions than as seen on the surface, which can be handled by individual comapnies. Example; filtering & verification of drivers, Map & road navigation, Driver search engine, Ratings verification for passengers, matching up drivings and passengers and a whole lot of other smaller tasks

Is there a large enough business case for each of these things? Large enough that multiple companies can do them? If you reduce them to what they are at their cores, are they not very similar tasks that can easily be automated?

Let’s assume we went with your suggestion, and in the driverless future, Uber handled the heuristics of predicting where people want to go and linking them up with a pool of riders heading in the same direction which will get them there fastest (Travelling Salesman problem). Let’s assume they outsourced the mapping and ML bits to a company as good at it as Google, and they outsourced the making of these cars to Ford or GM. Do you think a more efficient system has been created? Have you not in the process created more variables and potential points for failure?

Imagine in IoT, that very many small companies are providing different bits of the stack and the company that handles your smart door locks or smart bulbs gets acquired or gets mismanaged and run to the ground? What happens to the users? How easy is it to change a smart lock provider when the existing one has locked you out by…you know…ceasing to exist? How do you push a security patch to all those devices as fast as possible when each of their manufacturers/OEMs needs to approve them?

But…let’s assume it’s somehow more efficient. Some of these “daughter companies” will do better work than others, and so will have better financial performance. This effect will continue over a long period until some of them are SO BIG that they will start to take on the services that smaller companies are providing less efficiently and offer them at lower prices. (We’re right back at the beginning). This, if we take your “solution” to its logical conclusion, means that the government will get stuck in an infinite loop, playing whack-a-mole and breaking up large companies into “protocols” for the “benefit of all”, instead of…you know…governing.

What kind of behaviour does this incentivise?

Innovation? I think not. Why should I do more than the bare minimum when I will be broken up the moment I hit a certain size? How do you even determine what size companies get to before you break them up? Is it the same for every industry? If not, what players in the industry will determine those things, and based on what KPIs (and whose interests) will they do so?

Finally

I agree there are cases where decentralisation might overly diverge the focus of the idea, however, we also need to accept that it is too risky to hand off an entire industry to individual companies.

I’m glad you admitted this, but I don’t think entire industries have been handed off to any individual companies. Example. Who was mobile handed to? Apple with the best hardware? Google’s Android with the largest scale? Foxconn who manufactures the phones? Developers who make them useful?

Inequality is not solved by placing unnecessary restrictions on those who have earned their size. It is solved by providing an enabling environment for some of the less privileged to earn theirs, too. Things like internet access.

As you can tell, I’m pretty anti-government/regulation when it comes to issues like this, so I wrote a MUCH longer post than I intended to write one hour ago. I’m on the road, and I’m publishing this without proofreading, so I apologise for any typos, mistakes, etc. E dey happen.

1. In case you were wondering, I only titled the post Insoluble Salts and Insolvable Precipitates because I read your title as “[Dis]solving Monopoly” and it reminded me of Chemistry class in secondary school.
2. Well, except when we’re ridiculing Android for performing terribly on Snapchat. Aside: that has a lot to do with how Snapchat works. Snapchat photos are not actually photos. It keeps the video camera on permanently and takes a screenshot when you hit the camera button. The resulting image is worse in quality than the ones Apple’s camera app will render, but you don’t get that annoying jitter when switching between photo and video modes. And as you can imagine, this is good enough for most people (especially since it will get better). Android snaps look horrid because no Android OEM has been able to achieve the level of customisation and image processing Apple can afford because they control the entire stack. Silicon chipset to circuit design to iOS. Neat.
3. Aside: I think you should read this edition of my newsletter, where I talked about the relationship between Blackberry & iPhone, the demise of the former, and how Blackberry never saw it coming because their numbers were still on the rise and they were (as you’ve called it) a “world power”.
4. Also: Blackberry vs. iPhone by John Gruber (written in 2008, and just as relevant in 2016).
5. Oh, and by the way, interesting POVs from Benji Lampel and Buchi Okoro.