This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, June 17th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Big tech firms like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, and others are increasingly thought of as monopolies

and therefore are reasonable targets for being broken up, or at least hamstrung in an effort

to create more equitable markets.

Ryan Bourne in a new policy analysis takes a look

at even fairly recent history of claims for similar firms.

So there's this massive company, Kodak, and I'm thinking about buying some stock.

They seem completely totally indomitable based upon my readings of you know 1940s newspapers so what are you gonna tell me by don't buy sell sell sell?

For decades Kodak did seem a completely dominant company and not just the

amateur of photography business but the associated film business as well and they

developed an incredible model where they charge relatively low prices for

their cameras, made very high markups on the film associated

with them and obviously bundling those products together was incredibly profitable for

them.

As early as 1920, I think Kodak had 94% of the domestic film market and 96% of

camera sales. So you know, incredibly dominant company company but I think this is a great

example of the phenomenon that I'm trying to get across in my paper and that if you'd

have looked at this sector and looked at the huge economies of scale that a firm like Kodak was able to generate through that process and specialising.

It really did look like an unassailable monopoly and many people were making that case. It was associated with the camera industry in the same way that

Google, we talk about to Google to mean to search on the internet, but what the company didn't foresee was the possibilities that digital

cameras would completely disrupt the market even though the company

...