[tehjoker]

The ideological blindness that causes people to speak past each other is this.

Innovation requires reliable funding, such as monopoly profits or government funding. Monopoly leads to undemocratic concentrations of power and various private taxes on the public (e.g. in the case of Google, your personal information). Bell Labs was funded by monopoly funding with a law directing a certain amount to research.

Competition improves the balance of power, but destroys the ability to innovate except on relatively easy to engineer variations of existing tech within a 1-5 year window projects. The recipients of monopolist largess (such as OSS) whither on the vine as competition drives profits to zero over time (which then causes consolidation and monopoly formations...).

The answer I prefer of course is to create the efficiencies and innovative capacity of large scale industry but control them democratically. Nationalize Google.

[typewithrhythm]

This is a completely strange idea to me... You are seemingly measuring innovation within a specific product and forgetting that the product itself is a new creation that came without any monopoly as it built.

People eventually recognise a good idea, you don't need a well funded research group to have one. You need an environment where it's plausible for the new thing to work and be profitable.

Breaking up a giant like google seems that it would make it easier to promote an new idea, as it has less risk of being crushed by the interests of a tangentially related company.

[tehjoker]

The idea behind nationalization is that it takes Google out of the market economy and the profit motive. It's then possible to rationally design supports for new ideas, and removes one of the biggest reasons for fighting new ideas.

[typewithrhythm]

My experiences with actual nationalised companies does not support this; in general they are no more likely to support innovation or good design that supports other industries than the private sector, but they absolutely will create legal issues when trying to innovate around them.

Telecoms in Australia is probably the best modern example I can think of, the nbn was given a monopoly and now delivers an expensive inferior product, and there is no real way to compete or innovate around it.

It doesn't exactly take them out of the market, it just creates a enterprise with legal protections and non market motivations for what it actually does.

[briandear]

So how did Apple invent iPhone? What monopoly did they have?

Nationalizing anything is an absolute disaster for innovation. What innovations did Aeroflot develop?

The free market and a thriving entrepreneur ecosystem creates innovation. The profit motive is a powerful one. Taking risks to invent the next big thing is what drives entrepreneurship in the first place. Governments are corrupt, inefficient, and don’t get punished by the markets when they fail.

This idea that governments are democratic is a myth. I didn’t vote for tethered bottle caps in the EU. I didn’t vote to send money to fund wars. In the U.S., one can vote, but the policies that actually happen are the result of what lobbyists spent the most money buying the relevant congressmen.

The answer to this is smaller government. The most democratic thing there is is the free market. Everyone can vote or not vote with their money. And the results are seen nearly immediately and companies have to respond.

If we could choose to pay taxes on a line-item basis, that would be the most democratic thing ever. Because a rep that you voted for on one issue and is wrong on another issue gets his “wrong” initiative defunded and his “right” initiative funded. We should bring free market principles to government not government principles to the free market.

[johnnyanmac]

>This idea that governments are democratic is a myth. I didn’t vote for tethered bottle caps in the EU. I didn’t vote to send money to fund wars... If we could choose to pay taxes on a line-item basis, that would be the most democratic thing ever.

The last thing we want is the common people, unaware of the intricacies of all the things a government pays for, voting on what and how government is funded. That's a great way to get some huge budgets for circuses while forgetting to allocate for bread. The most important aspects of life are not glamorous, but they need to be funded for.

There's some merit here (maybe people can choose where 5-10% of the federal budget goes), but before we can even think about that we'd need to get the national debt under control. There's negative money to allocate as is.

>In the U.S., one can vote, but the policies that actually happen are the result of what lobbyists spent the most money buying the relevant congressmen.

That's more of a lobbying issue than a democracy issue, no? Ideally a democracy would uncover a large gift and the PR would completely tank chances of re-election. But alas, the people aren't caring or well-tuned enough.

>The most democratic thing there is is the free market.

THe endgame of a free market is monopoly. So a small government would give the exact result we have here with lesser chances of an antitrust.

[johnnyanmac]

it's not blindness to me. It's as simple as me rather accepting some short term chaos for a healthier long term market. Big changes are never without sacrifices.

>Innovation requires reliable funding, such as monopoly profits or government funding.

we have more than enough angel vestors, normal investing, bank loans, etc. to get any innovation off the ground. And I think people forget that the original innovation hubs for big adacement came from Acedemia. Now retrofitted to be a recruiting wing for private businesses who pay to capture that knowledge.

The only downside here is that they then cannot proceed to offer that product for free for a decade to capture a market before squeezing said market they captured. Is that a downside for people who don't/can't pay? Yes. But that is historically how every business has operated. Figure out how to optimize costs so they can profit, and balance it against the market you are targeting. Big tech has forgotten about that and simply throws money around like it's monopoly money (and it kind of is).

We need a huge overhaul of how all this works. Ironically enough by going "backwards" in a few areas.

[fasa99]

>Innovation requires reliable funding,

The way I see this argument is "Innovation requires an institution devoted to innovation, which requires reliable funding such as monopolistic or taxpayer"

As you say, on the 1-5 year horizon that's not true. Most successful startups are innovative, we need to look no further than Google itself with its pagerank innovation dominating search. Most universities have innovative researchers, and indeed explicitly set up innovative centers called "incubators" - but of course this is an example of government funding.

One of the first questions is what innovation requires 1-5 years. What about aha moment! innovation? Pagerank is an "aha moment" idea that takes a few months to demonstrate. There are more aha moment innovations than "grind for more than 5 years" I feel. Most of the "grind for 5+ years" innovations have yet to pay off e.g. fusion, super batteries, room temperature semiconductors.

A monopoly offers stable funding for some institution, but at what cost? No capitalistic incentive to improve product? Excess pricing because the consumer has no choice? Surely there are more fair ways to structure this.

Government control would destroy tech, government is not made for it. Look at Amtrak. A nationalized google would wither and get eaten alive by.. ... innovative search startups (themselves without research institutes funded by monopolies), or startups in one of the dozens of fields where Google has spread its tendrils.

Microsoft in its prime is a great example of monopolistic problems. They were a OS monopoly and kept leveraging that to smack down competition wherever they wanted to expand into. Google almost didn't make chrome - the CEO at the time was frightened that Microsoft would annihilate google if google should make a new browser. The monopoly engine allows for ease of dominating more and more industries through lateral growth. This all-encompassing destruction of captalistic price minimization, alone, is why we need to break down big tech monopolies such as google. An example of a "good citizen" non monopolistic company in this setting is Netflix - there's huge competition in entertainment field, they have innovated streaming tech, their profits are meritorious, and they haven't suffocated other fields like other big tech i.e. there's no Netflix phone, no Netflix video game console, no Netflix social media.

The other health of the Netflix / media ecosystem is it's not a duopoly. There's Netflix, there's Apple TV (hello, suffocating new industries!), there's Disney, there's paramount, there's hulu, and so on. This is what competition should look like. This is classic innovation in the capitalist sector, through brutal competition. We not only need to bust up monopolies but to consider duopolies or more generally - busting up groups of companies that collude to price or feature fix as holders of the majority of the market, which is what many duopolies are.