Yes, actually, there is - having $60m to throw around.
"Barriers to entry often cause or aid the existence of monopolies and oligopolies" [0]. Monopolies and oligopolies are definitionally the opposite of free market forces. This is quite literally Econ 101.
It doesn't solve the problem, but if money is the only thing preventing search engines from accessing Reddit, then what goes for Google also goes for Microsoft.
That's a symptom of the issue, not a solution. Bing is used because having your own crawler is infeasible, partially because you will be literally blocked in many cases.
Monopolies are entirely consistent with free market economics. After all, if there's clearly a "best product" for a particular niche, it's entirely rational (free market actor) behavior for everyone to use the same product, leading to its monopoly in that market segment.
I don't understand why people think this isn't/won't be/shouldn't be a common result of "free market forces".
Not in the least. Literally in the first semester, Economics 101 type class that any business/economics/etc student would take, it would be covered clearly that monopolies are violations of free markets.
A free market isn't a euphemism for anarchy or "no rules", it's a specific economic term. The things it is free of include artificial price floors or ceilings, barriers to entry, anti-competitive practices, etc. In other words, monopolies, oligopolies, cartels, monopsonies, etc are all violations of a free market. You do not have a free market if there is a monopoly supplier.
If one competitor is far enough ahead of the rest, they can maintain that lead given that they can extract sufficient momentum from their early mover advantage. If they keep this up long enough, competitors never reach the scale to sufficiently prevent them from becoming a monopoly (at least over their local market segment).
None of this requires anti-competitive behavior; simply good execution on the part of the leader.
Unless, of course, you're suggesting that "free markets" also involve government intervention to suppress their lead in the market...
This is a fair critique. I'm approaching this from an admittedly American perspective in which "free market" colloquially implies competition - but I recognize that competition is not inherently a free market concept.
Good callout!
Having Barriers to Entry != Anti-competitive
Yes, large players have advantages of Economies of Scale.
Just because you can't run an Airline because you don't have money to buy an Airplane isn't anti-competitive.
Today Microsoft, Apple, OpenAI, Google, Amazon all can afford those piddly $60m to license from reddit.
Not Anti-competitive at all.
But saddened by how much corporate-hate by HNers destroys their credibility in debating these thing.
Go ahead downvote
"Because barriers to entry protect incumbent firms and restrict competition in a market, they can contribute to distortionary prices and are therefore most important when discussing antitrust policy."
Antitrust policy then links to a page on competition law: "Competition law is the field of law that promotes or seeks to maintain market competition by regulating anti-competitive conduct by companies." [0]
So yes, I'd downvote you if I could, but HN doesn't allow downvotes - which is honestly pretty fitting in the context of this conversation.
