What does this mean? If there is no regulator, someone else will use force to prevent voluntary mutually beneficial deals from taking place?
What does this mean? If there is no regulator, someone else will use force to prevent voluntary mutually beneficial deals from taking place?
It means that markets organize somehow. Even black markets in prison have rules (and for all I know, sensible ones under the circumstances). The drug trade has rules and norms.
Cartels form and collude, the JP Morgans or Goulds of the world see excessive competition next to their neat steel or railroad trusts and decide to organize it. And sometimes this can even be an improvement (those old telephone poles with like 90 separate junctions just got too tall to be safe!)
But on average, the public would like (or should want) a say in how markets are organized, because it is both possible and lucrative to induce market failure. Big Tech is especially good at this (its arguably far more their speciality than technology is).
Markets are inevitable (try to stop them forming if you don't believe me), but market failures are generally not inevitable, they are generally the result of poorly refereed markets.
My definition of this (which apparently I'm now trying to popularize) is "power can never be destroyed, only moved".
If we destroy an entity that has power, the power goes someplace else and in the case of (democratic) government entities, it rarely ends up someplace better for us regular folks.
I'm not sure what you're saying. Are you arguing that breaking up monopolies takes power away from consumers?
I think GP is saying that nature abhors a vacuum in human affairs as well as in physics: the question isn't whether or not there's going to be a government or a currency or a regulatory climate.
The question is whether those things are going to be determined at a polling place by voters or in a smoke-filled room by gangsters.
I would have gone with corporation instead of gangster, but yes, exactly.
People so often rail against a government telling them they can't do something but so rarely justify they would be able to do it if the government was destroyed.
Who said I had anything against gangsters? ;)
But lets call it what it is: when a bunch of made men see a power vacuum and set up an informal clique with its own rules and loyalty tests while protesting "just a merchant nothing to see here"?
Thats like, the entry for gangster on the Wiki for the Sopranos.
> Big Tech is especially good at this (its arguably far more their speciality than technology is).
Well, yes. But that does seem to gloss over the important part which is how they do it - hiring lobbyists and influencing the official regulators. If the frame is that someone is going to be the most powerful force in the market then sure, but the government setting it to be a particular body by fiat just creates a ripe target for corruption.
The history of the tech industry has been one of where if left to their own devices coders would create a thriving and tolerant software ecosystem and the main thing stopping them has been IP law. And a secondary thing stopping them has been government pressure (there has been a bit of a spasm recently because of the aftereffects of, effectively, systems set up to support things like Operation Choke Point, for example).
Assuming some semblance of the rule of law, Google & friends ultimately can't stop someone competing with them unless the government is active in the space the space too. More formal regulation is probably just going to cement their position further.
Time and again people make the utterly unsubstantiated claim that attack dog regulators like Lina Khan are actually good for big business and bad for the small guy.
Year after year, big business lobbies, bribes, cajoles, blackmails, whatever it takes to get rid of attack dog regulators like Lina Khan.
I'm sorry friend, history does not say what you think it does. History says that good outcomes come from either brutally regulated monopolies (ATT / Western / the Labs), public/private partnerships (DoD funding the Internet, basically every major innovation we coast on today), and busting the fucking chops of mega-trusts (JP Morgan, Gould, steel, railroads, telegraph, it goes on and on).
Why does big business hate aggressive regulation if it's "actually good for them"?
They like a Goldilocks regulation, a little friction to new entrants, a lot of discretion in the hands of pliant former industry people.
They hate Lina Khan.
If they hate Lina Khan, it's because she's liable to make demands on them without knowing anything about their business. In the worst case, her office turns outright extortionist, as the current administration is bent on demonstrating.
None of that conflicts with the observation that large, well-financed, entrenched players better at navigating regulatory obstacles than small upstarts.
False, wrong, mistaken, and other balderdash.
They don't have anything against regulators and they certainly don't have anything against dumb regulators.
They've got a little red laser dot on the forehead of regulators who don't want a payday after a term of "public service".
"Because we poor public servants are always looking for some fat, private sectors payoff down the road. But I'm not looking, and by the time they can pull the strings to force me out, they'll be ruined."
- Chrisjen Avasarala
https://youtu.be/yBFJGz5P_G8
That may all be true but I don't see how it relates. Adobe can't prevent figma from going public if it refuses their offer. It's an open market. Nothing stops new competitors from joining.
Only regulators have absolute power in this regard. I'd prefer decentralized power
Preferring decentralized power is like preferring decreasing entropy, who wouldn't want that but it's almost never going to happen, and even local, temporary instances of such are miracles of nature meriting arbitrary study.
It's concerning that you don't see this, but makes no difference to how the world works.
That is one of the possible outcomes right? Producers have an incentive to collude and not compete with one another. They could create a consortium to fix prices, and use tactics such as acquisitions or _dissuasion_ to prevent new, more efficient competitors from undercutting their prices, thus distorting a free market equilibrium.
The consortium creates an oligopoly which prevents mutually beneficial deals that would have otherwise taken place in a regulated competitive free market between consumers and producers.
If there is no regulator, the company with the most money will use its money to prevent any deals that are inconvenient for it from taking place. Often those would be beneficial to the other parties or to the consumers.
Maybe it's not a great choice of words to say here "the large company regulates the space" but it's definitely a problem worth pointing out.
Yes. For example, Apple has complete control over their App Store. It's essentially a small economy in which they are the government, and it's a market they regulate with an iron fist. Because OUR regulators won't.
But they're dictators. There's no democracy, there's no voting, and Apple does whatever it feels is best for them. Just like a dictator would run their country.
There's plenty of mutually beneficial arrangements that Apple unilaterally struck down because they want to maintain their stranglehold on the market.
I think that's what the comment meant. Take it metaphorically