[LatteLazy]

One bit I don't quite understand: how is Uber a state granted monopoly? I get that they're allowed to exist only because the state so decides. But as far as I am aware, the state doesn't ban anyone else (lyft or your and me) from competing do they?

Sorry if I'm missing your point. Also, I quite like the "State as Platform" model.

[crispyambulance]

> Uber a state granted monopoly?

Well, they were able to setup a "Taxi Service" that undercut all existing Taxi's everywhere in the US. They were able to do this without concern about any of the regulations that Taxi services have to follow. Government regulation and existing Taxi providers were too slow to respond and were out-classed by the aggressiveness of Uber.

It's not accurate to say "state granted". Maybe it's more accurate to say "state granted by virtue of incompetence by the state"?

[bergstromm466]

> incompetence by the state

"In the movie Steve Jobs, a character asks, “So how come 10 times in a day I read ‘Steve Jobs is a genius?’” The great man reputation that envelops Jobs is just part of a larger mythology of the role that Silicon Valley, and indeed the entire U.S. private sector, has played in technology innovation. We idolize tech entrepreneurs like Jobs, and credit them for most of the growth in our economy. But University of Sussex economist Mariana Mazzucato, who has just published a new U.S. edition of her book, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, makes a timely argument that it is the government, not venture capitalists and tech visionaries, that have been heroic.

“Every major technological change in recent years traces most of its funding back to the state,” says Mazzucato. Even “early stage” private-sector VCs come in much later, after the big breakthroughs have been made. For example, she notes, “The National Institutes of Health have spent almost a trillion dollars since their founding on the research that created both the pharmaceutical and the biotech sectors–with venture capitalists only entering biotech once the red carpet was laid down in the 1980s. We pretend that the government was at best just in the background creating the basic conditions (skills, infrastructure, basic science). But the truth is that the involvement required massive risk taking along the entire innovation chain: basic research, applied research and early stage financing of companies themselves.” The Silicon Valley VC model, which has typically dictated that financiers exit within 5 years or so, simply isn’t patient enough to create game changing innovation."

Source: https://time.com/4089171/mariana-mazzucato/

[contravariant]

I don't think 'state granted monopoly' is a good way to phrase it. If you go by the quoted excerpt (which I largely agree with) then it's not so much a monopoly but more of a captive market, and it's not so much granted as merely 'allowed'.

And sure you could set up your own competing ride-sharing market, though you'd have to convince people to share and buy rides through your market and not the well known one, so eventually a free or mostly free market may come into existence but until that happens we'll have to deal with markets held captive by apps and webpages.

[bergstromm466]

Yeah, instead I'd rephrase to: 'state-enabled monopoly'. It is enabled through Patents and Copyright laws that keep knowledge, in the form of IP and 'trade secrets', artificially scarce and limited to American/Silicon Valley corporations.

"How can politicians look into TV cameras and say we have a free market system when patents guarantee monopoly incomes for twenty years, preventing anyone from competing? How can they claim there are free markets when copyright rules give a guaranteed income for seventy years after a person’s death? How can they claim free markets exist when one person or company is given a subsidy and not others, or when they sell off the commons that belong to all of us, at a discount, to a favoured individual or company, or when Uber, TaskRabbit and their ilk act as unregulated labour brokers, profiting from the labour of others?" [1]

+

"The IP system is an artificial construct that excessively rewards owners of intellectual property, granting them monopolies over inventions and ideas that in many cases are the product of generations of thinkers and/or publicly funded research.” [2]

[1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...

[2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/the-precariat-populis...