Breaking hospitality/zoning laws is not 'competition'. (AirBnb)
Breaking taxi/transportations laws and regulation is not 'competition'. (Uber/Lyft)
Misclassifying workers to bypass employment laws is not 'competition'. (All 'gig' companies)
Operating unlicensed financial services is not 'competition'. (fintech)
Being given special content liability carveouts only to your platform is not 'competition'. (social media)
Evading antitrust norms via vertical integration is not 'competition'. (Apple app store and 30% rent)
Flooding the market with illegal or gray-area imports is not 'competition'. (Amazon)
Exploiting data without consent is not 'competition'. (all tech at this point)
Using investor capital to subsidize predatory pricing is not 'competition'. (almost all tech)
Every industry 'new' tech has gone after they have cheated, broken laws and/or had/pushed for (normally after the fact) special carveouts from the law so that they are the only ones in their field that get to operate a different way, used and harvested data in bad faith, used predatory unsustainable pricing practices.
Show me where tech has 'outcompeted' without doing any of the above. Where the product didn't need special protections/carvouts to existing law, didn't exploit data/peoples trust, didn't use investment capital to artificially lower prices, didn't utilize 'grey areas' to skirt barriers that ACTUAL competing companies obeyed, where the product delivered, on it's own, created a unicorn.
Edit: Responding as edit because I've been timed out. Apple is doing rent-seeking enforced through ecosystem control. This is traditionally seen as a monopolistic practice and historically/based on capitalist philosophy companies that did this were seen as a threat to capitalism and broken up/punished for this behavior. Rent seeking is explicitly anti-capitalist in classical economic thought.
This one is competition though. No one is forced to use Apple or develop for Apple. People purchase Apple because they like their products more than the alternatives.
From the Wikipedia entry on vertical integration[1]:
>Vertical integration can be desirable because it secures supplies needed by the firm to produce its product and the market needed to sell the product, but it can become undesirable when a firm's actions become anti-competitive and impede free competition in an open marketplace.
...
>A firm may desire such expansion to secure the supplies needed by the firm to produce its product and the market needed to sell the product. Such expansion can become undesirable from a system-wide perspective when it becomes anti-competitive and impede free competition in an open marketplace.
...
>The result is a more efficient business with lower costs and more profits. On the undesirable side, when vertical expansion leads toward monopolistic control of a product or service then regulative action may be required to rectify anti-competitive behavior.
Let's take copyright law for example. Set aside the fact that the entire basis of copyright law is EXPLICITLY to give businesses a "monopoly," which is the exact opposite of competition. Your issue with AI is that they are violating or trying to change the meaning of copyright law? How do you square that with the past 250 years of history of businesses successfully lobbying to strengthen and change copyright law in order to protect their monopolies and weaken competition?
Or let's look into taxi laws. Where for decades taxi medallion owners and fleet operators in NYC lobbied to prevent the city from issuing new medallions.
You seem to believe that laws increase competition and that resisting/changing/lobbying against the laws is meant to decrease competition, which is plainly untrue. Often the exact opposite is true, which is the very definition of regulatory capture.
Capitalism is a system that seeks to benefit the common man by incentivizing profit-seekers to compete to create new innovations, to deliver goods faster/easier, and to lower prices. It also seeks to disincentivize profit-seeking through non-competitive means that don't benefit consumers, e.g. monopolies, oligarchies, regulatory capture, false advertising, etc.
You ignored my point on copyright and 'what about'd your own as if that makes copyright law somehow not currently exist. Without copyright you would have market failure. Who will invest in Bob's business if Tom can just undercut him? Who would make a multi-million dollar movie in your world? Write text books? How can Bob start a business doing those things if he can't get investment? This is a BASIC premise of the modern economy. Modern society wouldn't exist, and historically western society (starting when first applied in the "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning" in the early 1700s) has understood and embraced it's benefit. Business can't build their business around ignoring the law and then say 'our business model won't work under the current law' and then benefit from first mover advantage because they started by making illegal moves. Capitalism is not anarchy, it works within frameworks and constraints, including the law. Rewarding lawbreakers with 'first mover advantage' or additionally in AIs case special new legal carvouts creates INCREDIBLY perverse incentives.
For NYC you are arguing that it's OK for businesses to ignore laws that impact them. I disagree, I don't believe capitalism is 'anarchy'. Capitalism MUST exist in a framework with government regulation, as classical capitalist philosophy points out. Again all you are saying is 'tech is above the law because I don't like the law' and 'breaking the law if it means profit is TRUE capitalism'. Business was free to push to change the law NYC. They are not free to just ignore the law. They should definitely not benefit from first mover advantage when they got to be first by breaking the law.
Please don't say what I believe, but instead respond on substance. I believe businesses should not build their business on ignoring the law, using BILLIONs in funding (which combined with business corporate legal protections shields them from consequences of breaking the law), in order to distort the market and force a carveout for themselves and give themselves an unfair first mover advantage. I don't think lawbreaking is competition or capitalism. I believe if a business created their market penetration through breaking the law that even if the law is changed after the fact that specific business should be banned from the carveout as they had an unfair/illegal first mover advantage versus those that followed the law. Your model encourages and rewards law breaking and unfair competition, not healthy competition/capitalist growth.
I seem to believe that we are a nation of laws, that capitalism exists with in constraints, on of which are laws, and that breaking laws that get in the way of billionaire founders wishing to exploit an industry segment isn't competition/capitalism. Breaking laws to get an unfair competitive and/or first mover advantage should be punished not rewarded, as to do otherwise creates horribly perverse incentives.
I notice you didn't point to a single legitimate/untarnished unicorn.
All I can see AI doing is entrenching those large enough to integrate it into their offerings in a meaningful way, and sustain a significantly lower cost base.
I use copilot at $10/mo. Gpt4.1 costs $2/m in and $8/m out. I'd do that in a single day, easily. There is no way any product I try and make can compete with that while consuming any meaningful number of tokens.
