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Where Warren’s Wrong

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Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#201

Post by scarface74 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #199
scarface74 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m well aware of that. I’ve been arguing against government regulation.

It is possible to respond to someone while agreeing with them. But allow me to disagree with your conclusion. The problem isn't predatory pricing, but the network effects problem is still a problem. Now, granted, the problem is as much created by the government as anything. The law (CFAA, DMCA) makes it so that people can't create a Facebook "client" without Facebook's permission. If they could, suddenly you've got a…

The only way that you could make another Facebook client is by allowing third parties to access the social graph. Then you get Cambridge Analytics. When you give a third party access to “your” data with respect to your friends, they also have access to my data that I never gave them permission for.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#202

Post by jjeaff »

basch wrote: post #197
scarface74 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume that almost every company that YC funds is losing money and selling thier services at a loss. How could I compete by selling profitably? The whole idea of most VC backed companies is to grow big and lose money until they get acquired.

which is not the same as trying to purposely extinguish competition. its about INTENT, not just selling at a loss.

A textbook example of this would be Bezos dropping diaper prices through the floor and doing it long enough to nearly drive diapers.com out of business. After which, he squired the company.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#203

Post by scarface74 »

basch wrote: post #197
scarface74 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume that almost every company that YC funds is losing money and selling thier services at a loss. How could I compete by selling profitably? The whole idea of most VC backed companies is to grow big and lose money until they get acquired.

which is not the same as trying to purposely extinguish competition. its about INTENT, not just selling at a loss.

So all you have to do to keep from establishing “intent” is for Bezos not to send an email saying “let’s undercut price to kill the competition”....

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#204

Post by scarface74 »

jjeaff wrote: post #202
basch wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which is not the same as trying to purposely extinguish competition. its about INTENT, not just selling at a loss.

A textbook example of this would be Bezos dropping diaper prices through the floor and doing it long enough to nearly drive diapers.com out of business. After which, he squired the company.

Or YC funding a company until its non YC funded competitor went out of business to make its investment worth more.

I’m not saying that YC has ever done that. I’m just taking the argument to it’s logical conclusion.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#205

Post by scarface74 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #195
scarface74 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did these “sanctions” help foster competition and create the players that are dominant today? Microsoft is still just as dominant in the PC operating system market and the desktop productivity market as it was in 1999.

> Microsoft is still just as dominant in the PC operating system market and the desktop productivity market as it was in 1999. The sanctions were on the way they illegally leveraged that (legally attained) monopoly to monopolize other markets. Something which they've been decidedly less prone to do since. Well, at least for a while, they are now pretty much following the lead of the companies Warren is complaining ab…

You really think they didn’t set out to dominate mobile, search, the gaming market, etc?

You really think they had a strategy meeting and said that their strategy was going to be to always be a strong second?

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#206

Post by jondubois »

>> and effectively punish consumers for choosing the best option for them

Consumers today are fat and lazy. Whatever small part of me is a consumer, I don't care about that part. We should care about producers and their right to participate in a fair and open marketplace. The biggest problem in people's lives today is not related to a lack of options in terms of what to consume, it is related to a lack of options in terms of what they can produce and how they can produce it.

>> Start with the most obvious error: Bing was not even launched until 2009

Actually, her statement makes perfect logical sense. OP is the one who doesn't understand history. If the antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft did not succeed, Internet Explorer would have been the only internet browser which could run on Windows (which itself was a near total monopoly in the personal computing space) and therefore, through their control of IE, they could have created Bing and made it the only search engine in the IE address bar. Maybe they could even have blocked google.com completely if it started to become a threat or maybe they could have added an overlay on top of google.com so that they could replace Google ads with their own ads... The possibilities of what Microsoft could have done to stop Google would have been endless if it wasn't for the antitrust cases brought against Microsoft.

If anything, her point is too clever and too insightful for some people to comprehend.

Basically Elizabeth Warren seems to actually understand how the world works and she understands the huge impact of goverment policy on the economy instead of pretending that there is no impact.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#207

Post by AnthonyMouse »

scarface74 wrote: post #194
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software distributors use to pay retailers 60% of the retail price to be sold in stores. Because retail stores have to provide shelf space with real estate cost, unsold inventory cost, etc. How much is that cost to Apple? > It was 70% to be distributed in online app stores like the ones that Verizon use to run to distribute J2ME apps. And it costs 0% to be distributed in a Linux package manager. Possibly something…

You could download J2ME apps from anywhere. Honestly I used Verizon as an example but thinking back, Sprint’s store was a better example. I think Verizon used something different. Because retail stores have to provide shelf space with real estate cost, unsold inventory cost, etc. How much is that cost to Apple? So now the government should also decide what is a “fair” amount of markup? And it costs 0% to be distribut…

> You could download J2ME apps from anywhere. Honestly I used Verizon as an example but thinking back, Sprint’s store was a better example. I think Verizon used something different.

In which case the lesson is that by charging so much in a competitive market, that business unit failed. Which leads to the real point:

> So now the government should also decide what is a “fair” amount of markup?

It's not a matter of setting prices, it's a matter of having competition. Apple gets 30% because it's the only feasible way to distribute to iOS. If Apple was charging 30% and there was a competing Mozilla App Store for iOS charging 5%, I suspect Apple would lose some business to it. And if some people still think Apple's store is worth 30%, no problem -- let them pay 30% while others pay 5%. But the 5% option should exist.

> And seeing how little money you can make from Linux users, the value add for distributing packages on Linux makes the price about right....

The point is that it shows the cost of providing that service. If Debian can do it at scale for nothing, what is Apple doing that justifies 30%, and where is the option to get just the thing Debian does for free?

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#208

Post by baddox »

jforman wrote: post #162
baddox wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is literally nothing inherently illegal (in the US, at least) about building a monopoly in any case. This is not true, despite being repeated extremely often. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Alcoa

Huh, that ruling was pretty broad. Only pertains to the 2nd circuit as it wasn't reviewed by SCOTUS, but still. Do you know if it was a key cite in cases in other circuits?

I don't have a good citation, but my impression is that the Alcoa case was quite influential, and significantly expanded the power of antitrust law in practice.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#209

Post by AnthonyMouse »

scarface74 wrote: post #201
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is possible to respond to someone while agreeing with them. But allow me to disagree with your conclusion. The problem isn't predatory pricing, but the network effects problem is still a problem. Now, granted, the problem is as much created by the government as anything. The law (CFAA, DMCA) makes it so that people can't create a Facebook "client" without Facebook's permission. If they could, suddenly you've got a…

The only way that you could make another Facebook client is by allowing third parties to access the social graph. Then you get Cambridge Analytics. When you give a third party access to “your” data with respect to your friends, they also have access to my data that I never gave them permission for.

Making a third party client doesn't require any third party entity to access the data, only third party software -- which it already does. If your friend accesses Facebook via Firefox, Firefox inherently has that data. So does the operating system, the TLS library the browser uses, etc.

But it never has to leave your friend's device, and neither would it need to with some different client.

Re: Where Warren’s Wrong

#210

Post by ivalm »

scarface74 wrote: post #132
cgriswald wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be arguing for a winner-take-all approach to the market. Should future competitors to [monopolistic entity] be punished because [previous competitors] were unable to effectively compete? In any case, I don't think punishment is really an apt metaphor for breaking apart a monopoly.

So back in 1999 people thought that Microsoft would be dominant forever - how did that work out? Every company I named was once dominant. Even Spotify came out of nowhere and made the once dominance iTunes Music Store basically irrelevant without government intervention. It wasn’t government intervention that caused the once The Beleaguered Computer Company that was about to be crushed by MS what it is today.

Windows still has 75% market share for desktops (the thing they were a monopoly in)...
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