151–160 of 181 posts
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> When people say Europe does not produce behemoths Volkswagon, El Corte Englais, Credit Swiss, Ubisoft ... there's at least a few in each member EU state, just like the United States
Large companies, but none of these are anywhere near forming a monopoly.
Since most of my sales are from my own word-of-mouth - a google ad is a worthless investment. All that will happen is someone who has a gmail account will purchase from me, google will notice this, present an ad then I'll get charged for the ad on next purchase. Nice little earner for Google and Etsy but useless to me.
Opt out? Sure, but I'm sure there's a stinger somewhere in the terms that will cost me in some obscure way. No thanks. Its actually worth me spending 40 hours figuring out an alternative. Then be done with them completely. More likely I'll replace Etsy with a simple investment of 5 - 8 hours.
For those curious, I sometimes make wooden furniture as a hobby. These are one-offs. Sometimes on commission/custom order but otherwise I usually sell one piece a week. So no, I don't use google ads etc. I'm not a mass-produce kind of operation and my customers know it. Its part of the appeal.
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> I used to think etsy was cute and fun to the tune of ~$100M? https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/etsy
Etsy is a $6B public company now
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> If you don't like it, you move somewhere else. Yes, and if you don't like existing regulations you can just move to another country with different laws. No big deal, right? I do operate my own site in addition to selling on multiple marketplaces, but even with my efforts to diversify I am dependent, in part, on the sales I get from Etsy. I would be in a lot of financial pain if I lost that revenue stream, so "just…
Whenever you think about creating a new “regulation”, by which I assume you mean a new law , try to think of what the phrasing for that law would be and then think about the enforcement mechanism, the implications of the law as written, and the possible, even probable complications from the enforcement mechanism. If you come up with something that isn’t going to unfairly penalize startups and small businesses, you mi…
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Whenever you think about creating a new “regulation”, by which I assume you mean a new law , try to think of what the phrasing for that law would be and then think about the enforcement mechanism, the implications of the law as written, and the possible, even probable complications from the enforcement mechanism. If you come up with something that isn’t going to unfairly penalize startups and small businesses, you mi…
All of this may be true, and yet, it’s not a very strong argument against regulation. I’m glad that we have safety regulations, despite objections such as yours, because they have demonstrably saved lives.
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Most of the time when two sided markets gain market power through a dominant position, they still aren't a monopoly. They are an oligopoly employing game theoric positions that are worse than perfect competition but far from a natural monopoly. For example, even with Amazon there is Target and Walmart selling online and doing much more similar delivery times these days. The network effect of a two sided market defini…
Exactly! If the threat of competition holds prices below the profit maximizing levels for a monopolist you may have a local monopoly but it’s not a natural monopoly.
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They mean forced if they want to continue using Etsy, right? Or did I misunderstand the intent of your comment.
That means there is choice, which does not qualify as "forced".
No company forces bad work conditions on their employees either any more. Since you’re always free to leave. I’d think you can use force in cases like that though (IE at least previously some of Amazon warehouse worker issues)
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Etsy is a $6B public company now
my point is, they were never "cute", except maybe when it was just an idea in someone's garage and had near 0 brand recognition.
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Extremely limited evidence? How about water or electricity grids? Railroads? (City) Streets?
There are examples of enduring competition of all of those bar city streets within a single city, never mind nationally. Even streets aren’t a natural monopoly. If they were you wouldn’t have patchwork metro areas divided up between different municipalities. The benefits of consolidated ownership would be so great that the Bay area would have unified like New York’s boroughs did to form the city of New York. Private…
We also know that as Google Fiber entered any city the incumbent ISP immediately decreased its price.
Natural monopoly is a strange concept. Its formal definition by Baumol: "[a]n industry in which multi-firm production is more costly than production by a monopoly". ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly#/media/File:N... )
It sounds like it's almost true in every case where you are forced to duplicate components/processes/efforts/structures, plus even with diminishing returns economies of scale helps the big companies.
Of course why the big incumbents get complacent/inefficient, why they turn to regulatory capture instead of R&D, is a different question.
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> who is already selling at the rate they can produce goods? This is a pretty good question. If you sell handcrafted hard maple tables that go for $5k, it only takes two orders and you're suddenly coerced into a program. However, if that program leads to one sale more it only cost $500 - that's a pretty good ROI. The problem will be if Etsy is transparent and can demonstrate the incremental value of this service, and…
> if that program leads to one sale more it only cost $500 - that's a pretty good ROI Not if you don’t have time to make another table...
