So Rupert like monopolies? What a surprise...

I see that "extreme libertarian" Peter Thiel likes monopolies, and so does Rupert Murdoch. What a surprise.

Update:  for a bit more nuance on Thiel's views, here's an extract from a review of his book:

You see, Thiel is not interested in funding entrepreneurs trying to build a business that will beat the competition; competition, in fact, is precisely what he thinks every company should avoid. The true goal of every startup is to become a monopoly, a company so dominant in its technological arena that it can give investors enormous financial returns with cash to spare for the intensive R&D that can ensure its long-term viability. Google, Thiel points out, is a handy case study. The profits from dominating the Internet search business since the early 2000s have allowed it to diversify into cloud computing, mobile devices, and robotics. According to Thiel, this kind of market supremacy offers returns to more than just investors: companies that create de facto monopolies and use the profits to innovate, as Google has, are truly valuable to society. “Monopolies drive progress,” he writes, in his contrarian way. “The promise of years or even decades of monopoly profits provides a powerful incentive to innovate.”

His point is a good one—at least as a source for debate. Consider that today’s communications infrastructure is largely built upon innovations—the transistor, UNIX, digital signal transmission—that came out of AT&T, the U.S. phone monopoly for most of the 20th century. For contrary evidence, you might look to Microsoft, which has typified a powerful company’s use of bullying and market share to limit consumers’ choices without creating innovations of comparable magnitude. In any event, Thiel seems bothered by the fact that many economists focus on the dangers of monopolies without considering the potential benefits. In his cosmology, they’re simply mistaken. His faith in the ameliorative forces of the marketplace assures him that even a dominant company (such as Microsoft) will eventually be eclipsed by a younger and more creative company (such as Google). Capitalism, he promises us, has a habit of righting technological wrongs in time. ...

Thiel has been asking a huge question for a few years now: How can we avoid a dismal future of resource depletion, environmental degradation, mass unemployment, and technological stagnation? He thinks the answer is a new wave of startups that grow as large as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon but take on bigger problems, such as curing cancer or providing cheap, clean energy. He claims we aren’t making progress on such things now because we’ve grown less ambitious as a society.

As the review then goes to note, Thiel (and I would add, libertarians generally) have an unrealistic take on how research happens, and their disdain for government money going into research is against the evidence and is merely ideologically driven:

You wouldn’t know it from Thiel, but investing is most of all about providing the feedstock with which some of the larger companies—not to mention universities and government agencies like NASA or DARPA—work to solve difficult problems. Our ecosystem for innovation is no doubt imperfect, but it has an established logic and a proven success rate. Sometimes a good idea is seeded through government funding: a 1994 NSF grant led Stanford grad students Larry Page and Sergey Brin to found Google. In other cases, a startup’s ideas only really start to spread after the company gets swallowed by a larger one. The biotech companies that have been bought by pharmaceutical giants such as Pfizer and Novartis provide good examples. Startups that wisely resist getting bought up, such as Facebook or Google, usually don’t have much impact until they grow much larger (as Thiel acknowledges in his arguments for monopolies). Tesla—which took a $465 million government loan in its early days—manufactures 35,000 electric cars a year, making it interesting and successful. Producing 100,000 electric cars a year, as Tesla hopes it will by 2016, would make the company important and transformational.

The other thing about monopolies is that we only get to see Google as a "benevolent" monopoly for the future of the planet because of the attitudes held by its leadership, which does not dispute the need for action on the planet wide issue of CO2.  Can you imagine the difference if somehow Rupert was in charge of that company?

There's no doubt in my mind that because of its ideological views, libertarianism is the enemy of effective action on climate change.