[jay_kyburz]

Instead of smashing up successful businesses, you should tax them, and use the tax revenue to improve deficiencies in the market.

If the government thinks there should be more browsers, (or mobile os's) they should tax the existing ones and pay folks to improve the open source alternatives.

You _should_ outlaw behavior that creates monopolies, like predatory pricing etc

[transcriptase]

Canada tries this.

The result is higher prices for consumers and taxpayer money flowing into zombie companies that just happen be in regions where the party in power needs votes.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Instead of smashing up successful businesses, you should tax them, and use the tax revenue to improve deficiencies in the market.

The deficiency in the market is that laws exist that allow market concentration. Should we tax them to fund regulatory reform?

> If the government thinks there should be more browsers, (or mobile os's) they should tax the existing ones and pay folks to improve the open source alternatives.

Let's review the problem with Chrome.

Chromium is open source. Chrome is Chromium with some corporate misfeatures like DRM, but is also the thing with an advertising budget. Nobody notices that their browser quietly supports DRM, except that then more sites use it, and then open source browsers on open hardware cease to be viable because if you try to use it, it doesn't support the DRM, and then no matter how much better it is people won't use it because half the internet is broken.

If you made Chromium better, Google would just keep making Chrome based on Chromium and then Chrome would have all the improvements you made to Chromium and you've solved nothing. If you made a different open source browser under a license that didn't allow them to do that then they still have billions of dollars so if you do anything better then they can just add the same feature to Chrome. At which point people still don't use your thing because they want to watch Netflix, and Netflix continues to require windvine because the Judas browsers have the most market share so devices that support DRM are common and demanding it doesn't bankrupt them.

Or, you could fix the law that allows DRM to be used as a fig leaf for the true motivation of vendor lock-in and simply create an explicit adversarial interoperability exception to DMCA 1201, not only as a defense but as an affirmative right. Then the open source browser can legally break the DRM in order to implement an ad blocker and create a feature that Google won't put in Chrome, without giving Chrome any abilities the open alternative doesn't, allowing the alternative to gain market share.

> You _should_ outlaw behavior that creates monopolies, like predatory pricing etc

Predatory pricing isn't a cause of monopolies, it's a consequence. If it's happening, the last thing you want to do is ban it, because it's a red flag that tells you the market is broken and you need to fix it. If you leave the market broken, a company with enough market power to charge excessive margins has enough market power to screw the customer in a hundred other ways, and trying to ban every possible abuse of market power is a million times harder than smashing up monopolies.

[jay_kyburz]

You've twisted the argument to be about DRM. That's a completely separate issue. The only people to blame for DRM are the people who use it on their content, not the platforms that are forced to implement it.

The _cause_ of monopolies are successful businesses. I don't have a problem with successful businesses. I also don't have a problem with monopolies per se. If I invent some cool thing and I'm the only person in the world doing it, I have a monopoly - good for me. If I can deliver a product better than everybody else, and everybody else chooses to not compete with me any more, also good for me.

The crime is when you use your power "unfairly" to drive others out of business. (So that you can create or maintain a monopoly). Predatory pricing or agreements that restrict who can use your product, or what others can do.

[AnthonyMouse]

> You've twisted the argument to be about DRM. That's a completely separate issue. The only people to blame for DRM are the people who use it on their content, not the platforms that are forced to implement it.

The people to blame for DRM are the legislators who created laws allowing DRM to be used for anti-competitive lock-in, which is its primary purpose.

> The _cause_ of monopolies are successful businesses.

That doesn't track. Costco is a successful business, does it have a monopoly? Starbucks? Honda? Dell? McDonald's? Adidas?

> If I invent some cool thing and I'm the only person in the world doing it, I have a monopoly - good for me. If I can deliver a product better than everybody else, and everybody else chooses to not compete with me any more, also good for me.

The only time this happens for a non-trivial period of time in the absence of anti-competitive practices or regulations is for so-called natural monopolies. Otherwise there would be low barriers to entry and correspondingly someone else wanting to make some money by entering the market.

And even natural monopolies are extremely narrow. They tend to get drawn with thick lines because whoever holds the natural monopoly will be trying to tie all kinds of other services to it through vertical integration, e.g. the natural monopoly is "roadside fiber conduit" rather than "internet service" no matter how much the utility company wants to insist that you should have to buy internet service from the company that digs the trench or installs the utility poles.

> Predatory pricing or agreements that restrict who can use your product, or what others can do.

Oh, you meant predatory pricing in terms of dumping rather than charging monopoly rents.

The problem is that's basically not a thing for digital goods because dumping is selling below the marginal cost and the marginal cost for digital goods is zero.

And corporations are sneaky. To reiterate the DRM point, what Google does with remote attestation is extremely nefarious, not least because it's simultaneously subtle and effective.

What they do is, provide remote attestation services to third parties for Google-approved devices. Then things like bank apps require them, even though they provide no real benefit, because they're marketed as providing "security" and risk-averse bank managers don't want to be seen not using a hypothetical security feature. But now anyone who wants to make a competing device that isn't approved by Google can't pass attestation and therefore can't get customers because customers expect their bank app to work.

Then it's the banks rather than Google requiring you to use a Google-approved Android device and Google will claim they didn't require anything even though Google providing that otherwise-useless feature has in reality created a large anti-competitive barrier for anyone trying to make a competing device without Google's approval.

[jay_kyburz]

>The problem is that's basically not a thing for digital goods because dumping is selling below the marginal cost and the marginal cost for digital goods is zero.

Gmail is free, Docs is free, Maps is free, lots of google apps are free. This makes it very difficult few a new player to enter the market. This is predatory pricing.

Nothing else you said is really relevant to the forced sale of Chrome.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Gmail is free, Docs is free, Maps is free, lots of google apps are free. This makes it very difficult few a new player to enter the market. This is predatory pricing.

It isn't. Things with ~0 marginal cost end up being free or free-with-ads. Webmail was free before Gmail, OpenOffice was free before Google Docs, MapQuest was free before Google Maps, because that's the market price for those things.

> Nothing else you said is really relevant to the forced sale of Chrome.

Because we're talking about the forced sale of Android. The title of the article is:

> DOJ: Google must sell Chrome, Android could be next

But exactly the same argument applies to Chrome anyway. Google puts DRM in Chrome, allowing third party sites to take a dependency on DRM, and then competing browsers/devices without Google's approval get locked out because users want a browser and device that works with the whole web.

Not to mention the obvious conflict of interest that DRM is used to prevent ad blocking.

[MiguelX413]

OpenOffice isn't a product