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Microsoft's official "Bing Wallpaper app" does some nasty, malware-like things to Windows
(www.techspot.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
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Oh, free markets can solve these problems, but we don't have a free market. These big companies don't win because they're the best, they win because they buy the marketshare bribe companies to only support their platforms.
ISPs are a fantastic example here. Starting a new ISP is prohibitively expensive, not because of the physical materials you need, but the permits (which the ISPs lobbied for) and lawsuits w/ existing ISPs. In a proper free market, we'd have a lot more selection than we do.
What you call "free market" I call "crony-capitalism." In a free market, monopolies only stay monopolies if they continue to be better than the alternatives. In a crony-capitalist market, monopolies continue if they can make enough barriers to prevent competition.
I disagree. Monopolies are the end state of free market capitalism, and yes the economic system we experience in north America isn't true capitalism either.
I really disagree, but we haven't seen anything approaching a truly free market for 100 years or so, so it's really hard to say.
That said, one of the core functions of government is to break up monopolies to keep the market free.
I think by virtue of the government breaking up monopolies, it cannot be a free market. I do believe the government should make sure that corporations shouldn't be monopolies however.
Maybe if we're talking in absolutes, but most of the problems I see in our current market are due to cronyism. People generally hate Comcast (or local cable company of choice) and CenturyLink (or local DSL company of choice), yet it's incredibly hard to start an ISP due to local regulations and protectionism. Many people don't like Windows, yet they're "required" for many computing tasks due to agreements with others in the industry.
Price fixing and other types of collusion go against the principle of a free market, and if that goes on unchecked, I think it's appropriate for a government entity to step in. However, if a company is merely the preferred provider of a good or service and they're not colluding or otherwise preventing competition, there's no reason for a government entity to step in. So someone like Comcast should probably be broken up, but someone like Valve should not. Not all "monopolies" should be broken up, only the ones violating the law.
The issues with google and windows that you are pointing out are the result of corporate welfare and capitalism without regulation. It's incredibly expensive to start an isp yes. So it should be a nationalized service. MS got to where it was because they buy up competition, and there wasn't anyone who stepping in earlier to stop it.
If there were no issues w/ permitting, it's really not that expensive.
This article mentions some price estimates, which are $60k/mile (for buried cable) or $1-1.25k/house (excluding connection costs to the residences) (this one gives lower estimates). My city has 120 miles of roads and ~10k households, so the cost for my entire city is something like $7-13M, without hookups. Let's also assume it costs $1k/household to connect from the street (a figure I've seen quoted), so that brings the total cost to $17-23M for my city. If we assume the average household signs up for $50/month service, the payoff period is <3 years and average profit is 15%, we end up with 18-25 years to become profitable. I'm guessing this estimate is high since that profit margin probably includes startup costs, but 18-25 years to turn an initial investment into a 15%/year profit generator isn't bad, especially for something with inelastic demand like internet service (I'm guessing it's closer to 10-15 years).
I don't think internet should be a nationalized service, or even a state-provided service, though I do think there's merit to cities owning the physical infrastructure in their cities and allowing companies compete for customers on that network, mostly because them owning infrastructure presents a conflict of interest for direct competitors wanting to run their own lines. Larger government entities can and probably should own the backbone lines, but governments shouldn't directly provide the service because it's generally bad if you only have one option for a given service.
Not really, they got there by directly competing w/ IBM to build marketshare, and then contracting with PC companies to pay Microsoft a fee whether they included Windows or not. The only acquisition Microsoft made around that initial rise was for a company that made a presentation program that eventually became PowerPoint, and that's it until the Dept of Justice filed it's first official anticompetitive impact statement. Microsoft dominated the web browser market in the mid-90s because they were one of the first to market, but they abused this position by locking out competition from internal APIs that enabled better performance (2000 antitrust case).
Almost all of their monopolist behavior was with products they built themselves and locked people into, not products they bought to stop competition, that nonsense didn't start until fairly recently (i.e. Github and Activision/Blizzard). For most of Microsoft's time, their monopolist behavior was simply abuse of their market position to either force companies to pay Microsoft even if they didn't ship Windows (thus pushing them to ship only Windows) or locking out direct competition for their products on their platforms.
You're just describing free market capitalism.
The companies are free to do what they want without government telling them they can't do XYZ.
I disagree, because like you say, they can just use their position to harm competitors.
A crony-capitalist market is just the natural end result of free market capitalism.
Only by regulating the market and not having companies be free to do whatever they want can you have healthy competition and companies that benefit people.
I'm really not.
Free market capitalism differs from our current economic system in regulations and taxes, which manipulate normal supply and demand. For example, we subsidize EVs, which makes EVs more attractive than they normally would be, which encourages EV companies to keep prices higher than they normally would. We also subsidize roads, which makes cars more attractive than other modes of transportation. We also levy tariffs, which prioritize locally produced goods and goods from friendly trade partners, and may be unequally levied based on product type to protect certain types of domestic industries.
Free market capitalism does not prevent all regulations. You can still ban price fixing and other forms of collusion w/o violating those underlying principles of non-interference. Companies are not "free to do what they want," they are restricted from colluding w/ government to get special favors or handouts. A system with a properly separated government and market means the government only steps in if there's a crime, and the list of possible crimes should be limited and not target specific industries. Companies can still acquire others and whatnot to form conglomerates, but doing so is only profitable if they're breaking some other type of law so it may trigger an investigation.
Once you allow the government to directly regulate the market, you open the floodgates to cronysism. Regulations disproportionately hurt small companies because large companies can overcome it and use those regulations as a weapon against potential competitors.
Nobody challenges cable companies because cable companies can tie up competitors in court over permitting and whatnot to exhaust whatever investment capital they have on legal fees, so the only real competition possible is government (muni fiber) because they control the permitting or new tech (Starlink, point-to-point wireless) because they can sidestep the permitting. If permitting was substantially easier, we'd see more competition in the ISP space (and probably reuse of existing lines since it's better to make a deal than run separate lines or lose 100% profit).
The only way, IMO, for regulations to be a net good WRT competition is if government is sensible and untouchable by corporations. I don't believe that's feasible, so the next best is to limit the ability of governments to make laws that impact the market so corporations don't have anything to gain through lobbying.