alt Hacker News> There is no advantage to horizontal integration for consumers in those industries. If anything, the value is negative. The fact that people are quite a bit happier about credit unions than Chase says everything you need to know.
IMO this claim is just too strong. I think you'd end up breaking up (or trying to) Lloyds of London, Spacex, Fedex, DHL, Boeing, Panasonic, ASML, Google, Apple, and many other very specialized companies. These businesses would be very expensive if they could only supply 1/5 of the market, to the point that many people would be totally priced out. The world can barely support 1 ASML, imagine if we had to pay for 5 of them. We'd be sent back to the 2000s, and that's _just_ computing.
> I think you'd end up breaking up (or trying to) Lloyds of London, Spacex, Fedex, DHL, Boeing, Panasonic, ASML, Google, Apple, and many other very specialized companies.
I see exemplars and no counterexamples.
Boeing turned to garbage when it took on McDonnel-Douglas--we were better off with the separate companies. YouTube not being bought by Google means that you don't have a single giant ad juggernaut and the copyright infringement that goes along with it. Apple being busted up means we have a division that actually focuses on computers in their own right rather than being a vestigial graft to the phone services division. Fedex was enough of a monopoly problem that Amazon bought carriers and, very painfully, set up its own delivery system.
> The world can barely support 1 ASML, imagine if we had to pay for 5 of them.
So, you prefer that we are two Chinese drone strikes from having a chip economy meltdown?
This is the kind of stuff that absolutely needs diversity. And part of the reason the ASML stuff is so expensive is because it doesn't have enough volume. So, for example, if the US had multiple fab lines that could consume the ASML machines, that would reduce the costs for ASML.