[alexey-salmin]

> Driving up market pay for workers via competition for their labour is exactly how we get progress for workers.

There's a difference between "paying higher salaries in fair competition for talents" and "buying people to let them rot to make sure they don't work for competition".

It's the same as "lowering prices to the benefit of consumer" vs "price dumping to become a monopoly".

Facebook never did it at scale though. Google did.

[eru]

> It's the same as "lowering prices to the benefit of consumer" vs "price dumping to become a monopoly".

Where has that ever worked? Predatory pricing is highly unlikely.

See eg https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2017/Hendersonpreda... and https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/03/public_schoolin.htm...

> Facebook never did it at scale though. Google did.

Please provide some examples.

> There's a difference between "paying higher salaries in fair competition for talents" and "buying people to let them rot to make sure they don't work for competition".

It's up to the workers themselves to decide whether that's a good deal.

And I'm not sure why as a worker you would decide to rot? If someone pays me a lot to put in a token effort, just so I don't work for the competition, I might happily take that over and practice my trumpet playing while 'working from home'.

I can also take that offer and shop it around. Perhaps someone else has actual interesting work, and comparable pay.

[alexey-salmin]

> Where has that ever worked? Predatory pricing is highly unlikely. > See eg

Neither of the articles understand how predatory pricing works, assuming it's a single-market process. In the most usual case you fuel price dumping in one market by profits from the other. This way you can run it potentially indefinitely and you're doing it not in a hope of making profits on this market some day but to make sure no one else does. Funnily enough the second author got a good example but still failed to see it under his nose: public schools do have 90% of the market, and in many countries almost 100%. Obviously it works. Netscape died despite having a superior product because it was competing with a public school so to speak. Browser market is dead up to this date.

> And I'm not sure why as a worker you would decide to rot? If someone pays me a lot to put in a token effort, just so I don't work for the competition, I might happily take that over and practice my trumpet playing while 'working from home'.

That's exactly what happens and people proceed to degrade professionally.

> Perhaps someone else has actual interesting work, and comparable pay.

Not unless that someone sits on the ads money pipe.

> Please provide some examples

What kind of example do you expect? If it helps, half the people I personally know in Google "practice the trumpet" in your words. Situation is slowly improving though in the past two years.

I'm not saying it should be made illegal. I'm saying it's definitely happening and it's sad for me to see. I want the tech industry to move forward, not the amateur trumpet one.

[eru]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing says

> For a period of time, the prices are set unrealistically low to ensure competitors are unable to effectively compete with the dominant firm without making substantial loss. The aim is to force existing or potential competitors within the industry to abandon the market so that the dominant firm may establish a stronger market position and create further barriers to entry.[2] Once competition has been driven from the market, consumers are forced into a monopolistic market where the dominant firm can safely increase prices to recoup its losses.[3]

What you are describing is not predatory pricing, that's a big part of why I was confused.

> Funnily enough the second author got a good example but still failed to see it under his nose: public schools do have 90% of the market, and in many countries almost 100%. Obviously it works.

Please consider reading the article more carefully. Your interpretation requires the author to be an idiot.

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What you are describing about browsers is interesting. But it's more like bundling and cross subsidies. Neither Microsoft nor Google were ever considering making money from raising the price of their browser after competition had been driven out. That's required for predatory pricing.