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OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly

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21–30 of 171 posts

Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly

#21
post #4

> What Visa did in response recently got it sued by the Justice Department, which accused Visa of using aggressive tactics with companies like CostcoCOST $956.14 (-0.29%) and AppleAAPL $258.99 (0.35%) to guarantee that a competitive payment network would not develop, The Wall Street Journal reported. I don't buy the reasoning as to how Visa built a moat. From the WSJ article linked in the article: >> Visa offered to…

> thing with credit cards is that you can have more than one. I have a Visa and a Mastercard and when I shop at Costco I use Visa. I don't see this reason stopping someone wanting to compete as though if they can't get the Costco dollars, they have no product. I'm sorry, are we really saying that it's acceptable for the market to begin preferring one completely compatible payment network vs another? This is clearly a…

> No one should have to open an account with visa just to shop at a retailer.

You know you have to pay just to enter Costco right? What's the difference if they want to force customers to use cash or Visa. Do you feel the same way about businesses that reject Discover?

I really don't understand the outrage.

> Ahhh, fearmongering about KYC. Know your customer is an obviously good regulation for banks to know the type of business they are partnering with for both risk assessment and anti fraud protections. So, what scams are you in favor of allowing by removing KYC regulations?

KYC and AML measures have a limited impact on stopping fraud and terrorism financing. Current efforts intercept only an estimated 0.1 to 0.2 percent of laundered money. A 2018 study suggested that the overall impact of AML policy intervention on criminal finances is less than 0.1 percent, which is considered negligible. This aligns with a 2011 UNODC report indicating that "much less than one percent (probably around 0.2 percent)" of the proceeds of crime laundered via the global financial system are seized and frozen.

Regulations should not be judged by intentions but rather results

https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/why-anti-money-laundering...

Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly

#22
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing with credit cards is that you can have more than one. I have a Visa and a Mastercard and when I shop at Costco I use Visa. Well... yeah. No shit. Because you couldn't use the Mastercard if you wanted to. That's what this article is complaining about. And in their most recent quarter Costco posted a handy 80 billion in net sales, I'm betting those processing fees added up to a tidy sum for Visa, corroborat…

Is it any different from a movie theatre or restaurant selling only Pepsi products due to exclusive agreement? Or Playstation paying for a game to be distributed only on their platform? How about a sports team only allowing Reebok or Nike or Adidas or whatever? Don't get me started on Netflix only movies!

1) Whataboutism is not a counterpoint

2) Half of these are completely nonsensical and apples and oranges to the topic.

Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly

#26
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing with credit cards is that you can have more than one. I have a Visa and a Mastercard and when I shop at Costco I use Visa. Well... yeah. No shit. Because you couldn't use the Mastercard if you wanted to. That's what this article is complaining about. And in their most recent quarter Costco posted a handy 80 billion in net sales, I'm betting those processing fees added up to a tidy sum for Visa, corroborat…

Is it any different from a movie theatre or restaurant selling only Pepsi products due to exclusive agreement? Or Playstation paying for a game to be distributed only on their platform? How about a sports team only allowing Reebok or Nike or Adidas or whatever? Don't get me started on Netflix only movies!

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly

#27

Doesn't explain what regulations Visa pushed for and got which helped it maintain its monopoly. Would be helpful to have some concrete examples of what it did and what OpenAI is trying to do. The point of the article sounds plausible, but doesn't really present any evidence to support it. Also OpenAI in no way has a monopoly of the kind that Visa/MC has.

Idk why government can't even regulate variable pricing that Visa/MC charges...

European governments can. The US government could, but the Visa/MC lobbyists are so nice and friendly.

Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly

#28
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it any different from a movie theatre or restaurant selling only Pepsi products due to exclusive agreement? Or Playstation paying for a game to be distributed only on their platform? How about a sports team only allowing Reebok or Nike or Adidas or whatever? Don't get me started on Netflix only movies!

1) Whataboutism is not a counterpoint 2) Half of these are completely nonsensical and apples and oranges to the topic.

It's not whataboutism. Whataboutism would be 'what about children dying in Darfur?'

This is an explanation that this practice is normal in a competitive environment and trying to prevent exclusive deals is silly if you extrapolate it to other domains

In other words, create a rule or principal that's clear and not specific to this situation. Because right now the principal seems to be exclusive deals between businesses should be illegal and I explained a handful of cases where this would obviously apply

Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly

#29
post #24

It was a great marketing strategy, imo, to say AI is so scary and impressive and awful it needs to be regulated immediately. Helps them look impressive and good willed & kills all competitors.

So you’re saying there’s no competitors to ClosedAI? How do you arrive at that conclusion?

Re: OpenAI is Visa – Buttering up the government to retain a monopoly

#30
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by companies with a fraction of OpenAIs resources. Meta and Google are orders of magnitude greater than OpenAI and they're the only contenders that have challenged GPT models. > But what about Mistral et al? They are not even near GPT-4o. Good gpt-3.5-turbo alt tho.

You might be interested in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42514633 In fairness, OpenAI has been leading benchmarks for the most part, but open source is never more than 3-6 months behind.

Just because some one has a slightly better product doesn’t mean they have a monopoly. That’s like saying McDonalds has a monopoly because they have better fries. It’s just not true in any part of the statement
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