I think Charles Gave and George Friedman have both pointed out that the technology sector is loath to address their externalities. The old saw about the car not starting and the mechanic saying "have you tried turning it off, getting out, getting back in and starting it up again" is funny but also desperately insulting: as a society we put up with the bullshit the tech industry pulls on the reg not because it's appropriate or expected but because the tech industry insists we have to.
I think people in the tech industry have no problem insisting that I need Authy on my phone like a goddamn Enigma Machine if I want to (checks phone) post on the company Instagram page while also shrugging their hands at the notion that the entire fucking 2FA apparatus is beholden to a company whose server password is "companyname123". It's like how high and mighty Sony got about people ripping off their CDs while also insisting that putting malware on their CDs was exactly what a multinational company was within their rights to do. And then kept their passwords in plaintext. And still subscribe to a credit card verification server that doesn't acknowledge the existence of credit unions.
I worked for a company in Budapest that was one of these outsourced dev teams. Actually, it was OUR dev team, who our CTO bought from us. He then started a new company with this dev team, and sold their dev skills to us, and a bunch of other companies around the world.
Now, we had a great team of young Hungarian guys and gals - about 20 of them - that were at the cutting edge of technology in a country still waking up from long hibernation under Communism. Most these kids were like 10 when the Iron Curtain fell, so they had no real understanding of what living in a communist country was like... they just grew up in a depression where there were no jobs and their grandparents lived on cat food.
So being in a high-tech job, making a high-tech salary and benefits, and working with international companies was a HUGE thing for them.
Which, once the CTO spun them off into a separate dev shop, quickly went away and it became a low-cost, low-overhead, hackathon dev that did anything for a buck.
That's the problem with us tech industry types. We have these big altruistic ideas that we get rolling, and then we go back to focusing on our work and leave the operational details to the suits and useless MBAs, and it all goes to shit.
Thanks for this interesting read. I wasn't aware one can buy a company and then place the debt created onto that company... It doesn't make much sense.
And also, why is Private Equity and their methods of mass-mergers not seen as a problem by the European Competition Commission? A monopoly is a monopoly, no?
Modern conservative and neoliberal thinking do not hold that monopolies are bad. Neoliberal thought, in fact, rewards monopoly. I would argue that the ECC does not have a problem with private equity because Goldman Sachs runs the world.
Fun tidbit of history that isn't well known: one of the modern architects of the shift in monopoly thinking from "how much market share?" to "how are consumer prices affected?" was none other than Robert Bork himself, when he was one of Nixon's personal devils, before he had made his name as a national devil.