[echelon]

> Apple as Monopoly argument

> competition is what's supposed to protect us from rentier nobility

Google and Apple won smartphones, and now they get to tax everyone forever. Innovation in that space is dead, as both companies leech off of their earlier success.

That's so fucked.

An enormous amount of innovation capital is going straight into Apple and Google's pockets for what amounts to a distribution racket.

For so many things, you have to do mobile. Web apps are truly second class citizens, and most people do computing on smartphones instead of laptops and desktops.

So you adopt the app distribution model: then you're faced with the App Store and and all its toxic warts. Paid ad placement against your trademark. Draconian rules. Forced tech upgrade cycles. Inability to deploy on your own company's cadence. Break the rules, and you're out. No runtimes, fat taxes, no customer relationship.

Tech didn't used to be this authoritarian. We had a twenty year period of nearly unfettered freedom.

Apple and Google can't be both the hardware and the software of phones. That's wholly unfair to every other class of business.

We need four or more options for phones. Not two. And they shouldn't be able to unilaterally act as gods to block your access to millions of Americans. These aren't gaming consoles.

[globalnode]

We need a little more institutional oversight for the benefit of everyone else. But it seems government is in the clutches of big tech and special interest groups with big money. So I wont hold my breath on that.

[brnaftr361]

I think it's too much oversight that allows these sort of behaviors. Too many moats that are too deep and too wide.

If GIMP could ship with the Photoshop key map and have nigh 1:1 behaviors these things become commodities and thus must compete for distinguishment. As it stands Photoshop is there almost exclusively as a product of inertia and so Adobe can leave it to stagnate.

[jjoonathan]

I see "less oversight is One True Way to encourage competition" more as a conservative talking point than as a good faith anti-monopoly proposal. As a tactic, deregulation seems to be very good at reinforcing the social order (it's usually exploitable in proportion to current standing) but extremely mediocre at encouraging competition when compared to the alternatives.

If you ask a business about their moats, they'll talk your ear off about network effects, two sided markets, last mile infrastructure, brand power, property portfolios, scale... and if you listen from the inside, you'll hear about dumping, bribery, buying out competitors, and leveraging existing monopolies into adjacent domains. Sure, once in a blue moon regulatory capture will slip onto that list as a minor player, but it's the clumsy scrawny kid on Team Anticompetition. It might deserve 10%, maaaaybe 20% of your trust-busting efforts -- but 100%? There are only two reasons to give it 100% of your attention: either you don't know the bigger, stronger, nastier members of the anti-competition team (implausible, if you've been in business for any period of time) or you have an ulterior motive. Since there's an obvious and massively profitable ulterior motive, I tend to believe in incentives over words on this one.

While regulatory capture is real and it's a problem and the solution is deregulation, I am mighty suspicious whenever I see this proposal alone rather than in a lineup of more traditional trust-busting strategies like Sherman Act litigation or tax policy, which tend to fall on the other side of the big/small govt debate.

[brnaftr361]

>it's usually exploitable in proportion to current standing

As I reckon it, standing is derived from the system. The system gives license to Apple to patent certain aspects of design, trademarks, etc. They don't have a truly market-derived end, what they have is derived from a much greater system in competition with others who've been borne similarly by systemic effects rather than market pressure. Restoring market pressures by breaking down such walls - certainly a progressive talking point - seems more likely to induce competition and thus affecting prices and priorities across the board.

I'd also make the aside here that I expect a large proportion of the businesses extant today existed in a "pre-capture" environment and made up the "post-capture" environment up for themselves, that is to say they wrote the book on what defines dumping by bribery which also bought them the lax oversight on antitrust - giving them license to subsume competition and permeate the market and expand.

That is to say take away an avenue like IP from companies like Adobe for example, and commodify their products. Conversely, giving competitors license to make bold faces copies of competitor's products results. In either case, I would expect the end to be very similar: more real competition as in driven by market pressure and selection.

With that said, such a policy wouldn't remedy conglomeration, which I would definitely submit is a problem, but ostensibly in many domains this would be a self-correcting as the barrier of entry doesn't require reinventing the wheel as a non-wheel-geometric-rolling-variation-on-a-circle-that's-never-quite right.