Your friendly neighbor from LPR

Thank you, very good channel, I’ve subscribed. Now about the video.

In effect, it was convincingly demonstrated to us, with illustrations, that modern corporations differ little from states, and vice versa. Not every business becomes a mega-corporation capable of effective expansion, but rather the one that performs the function of a platform for other businesses. The costs of scaling a platform business are relatively low, and profit primarily depends on the network effect. Therefore, old-style corporations, like Gazprom for example, will not move the needle in the new global market, but Yandex, for instance, is a serious player with prospects for further growth, especially if it manages to devour the Russian Federation that is getting in its way.

But here is the thing. There are relatively few actual employees in such corporations. However, the development of platforms is a factor that contributes to the success of small businesses, or even freelancers, who earn their living on these very platforms. With every new platform, there are more and more people earning money on them. The platforms themselves have far more, of course, but why should we care?

No, we shouldn’t care, as long as the game looks fair. The video describes several cases where the game was played ruthlessly, while the players were in significantly different weight categories. Corporations, becoming comparable to states in power, can well afford methods that are more appropriate for criminal gangs. Should we expect the good old territorial gangster to take a swing at the young, arrogant, and extraterritorial one? Should we fear the new gangster more than the old one?

Anything is possible. One can easily imagine evil corporations in a free market, as Hollywood has depicted them in abundance. But there is still a certain air of theatricality surrounding such companies. It is much easier to imagine a corporation merged with a classic state in symbiosis, using political methods to eliminate rivals when brute force is more convenient, and economic power when a softer approach is better. We see such corporations already; they eat US presidents for breakfast. But we also see the power of civil opposition to dirty tricks, as exemplified by the recent GameStop story.

Following the author of the video, I shrug my shoulders many times in this post because we see that the rules are changing right before our eyes, and it is not entirely clear exactly how “the market” will resolve it. But for now, I can make a cautious assumption that the market will push states further aside so they don’t interfere, and the owners of various platforms, as the market saturates, will fidget less and value the predictability of rules more. And for this, they will have to follow them themselves. By rules, I don’t mean what the platform owner demands from their users, but what the platform owners have agreed upon among themselves. And with the emergence of law, conflicts are resolved much more easily and cause much less damage.