Antitrust laws don't work because they're subjective and are enforced by political appointees.
The simpler solution is a tax on scale -- a graduated corporate revenue tax, aggregated across any group of entities which meet the common control [1] criteria. Then it's just a tax, and you simply have to collect it. Very little wiggle room.
If splitting your company in half wouldn't impair any of its lines of business, the CEO has a powerful financial incentive (lower tax rates on the two halves) to do so.
I don't think that works in the situation of fabs. They are big and expensive pieces of tech with the latest fabs being the most expensive to construct.
You can't exactly break up a chip manufacturer when they have just 1 or 2 plants tooled for the latest memory.
IMO, recognizing chip fabrication as a national security asset and turning it into a public corporation would be the better way to go. Let the likes of intel/amd/or micron continue developing chips. But also, take control of the most expensive and risky part of chip manufacturing to make sure we don't fall behind due to corporate budget cuts. You also keep and continue to build expertise in a vital part of modern society.
Is that a joke? Socializing important industries has always been a disaster. Government run organizations have never been able to innovate on a sustained basis.
Lots have even in America. 2 famous ones are the NIH and the National Laboratories.
In fact, the largest, most advanced, and best known semiconductor manufacturer is primarily government owned: TSMC.
The only thing that gets in the way of their ability to sustain innovation is administrations hostile to publicly funded research.
Outside of innovative industries, there are plenty of examples of important government ran organizations aren't "disasters". Some of which can only be effectively ran via government. For example, healthcare.
What's been a disaster is relying on privatization and capitalism to solve all problems. That's the system of government we had in the dark ages.
Not only that, there was government-led chip research in Taiwan before TSMC (ITRI). And it was going nowhere. If Morris had stayed in ITRI, Taiwan would probably look like a developing country whose primary value is to host the US military bases today.
TSMC's largest shareholder remains the Taiwanese government. And it would not have been a thing without the direct intervention of the government through ITRI.
It would not exist without the government's direct intervention.
I mean, to take that one step further, if the underlying process-node technology (e.g. EUV) were nationalized, then you an entire nation-state's budget (and ability to get cheap loans) could be thrown at the problem of rapid horizontal buildout of fab capacity. Economics similar to nuclear power generation.
Exactly. And even if it ultimately doesn't turn a profit (which, who knows, it probably will turn a profit) you've still created a pretty favorable circumstance for chip manufacturers.
There's a reason why basically only Intel does inhouse fabrication and even they have had to rely out outsourcing it.
What do you think antitrust laws are going to do? Force Micron to continue producing consumer DIMMs in a heavily commoditized market? Stop server builders from building servers? Stop companies from building data centers around the globe?
Monopolies never last in the tech industry. IBM had a monopoly on mainframes. And they even kind of still do, but now no one cares because disruptive innovations in other computing platforms have made mainframes nearly irrelevant. Now startups like OpenAI and Perplexity are using disruptive innovations to rapidly make Google's traditional web search business irrelevant.
OpenAI is having to pull insane amounts of funding to even stay alive.
Google is about to lay waste to everyone.
Google is using their nation state wealth to once again dominate a new sector. Wealth gained from unfair monopolization of search and web and mobile.
Google changed the notion of the URL bar to search. They control every ingress. Now, if you want to access a name brand registered trademark, it flows through Google search. Brands have to pay extortion money to Google to keep others from sniping their rightful name brand.
Google gets even more money because there's a bidding war.
Google pays to put themselves as middle men in front of nearly every web access.
Google doesn't just have a monopoly on this, it's downright unethical and should be tried in court or have laws written to make this illegal.
I have no love for OpenAI, but how do they even compete with the hundreds of billions of dollars this nets?
> Monopolies never last in the tech industry
Google is an invasive species in the ecosystem. They're killing viable competition by engorging themselves and taxing non-productively.
Capitalism should be hard. It should be live or die regardless of size or scale. Google is barely breaking a sweat.
