The monopoly strategy behind the Google/Microsoft mobile patent wars • Hacker News Board

Re: The monopoly strategy behind the Google/Microsoft mobile patent wars

#61

Post by saghm » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 6:00 AM UTC

Nasrudith wrote: post #56

guerrilla wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no credible economic theory of firm “power seeking” How is the theory of market power combined with everything else we know not that? [1] It seems obviously in the firms interest even if their primary motive were still profit since it ensures increased rates of profit (modulo risk of a regulatory smackdown.) 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_power

The idea of powerseeking is an outright reification of power that conflates definitions by assuming the worst possible light. Influncing the market doesn't mean complete control over production - that is an obsession of Marx's ideological descendants. Just influncing it in either direction for any reason works. Providing it cheaper than market rates or convincing others to pay more also qualifies. If everyone in a vi…

> If we call increasing efficiency "power seeking" then the term has lost any and all meaning and only serves to confuse and make the most mundane actions sinister by interpreting them in the most conspiratorial light.

Sure, but simply calling an acquisition like the one discussed in the article "increasing efficiency" interprets it the best possible light, which seems equally in need justification.

Re: The monopoly strategy behind the Google/Microsoft mobile patent wars

#62

Post by saghm » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 6:08 AM UTC

AlbertCory wrote: post #3

What an ignorant blowhard Cory Doctorow is. " This is a great strategy in light of US anittrust [sic] theories over the past 40 years, during which time antitrust regulators promised to leave companies alone as they formed monopolies, provided they didn't hike price after attaining monopoly dominance. " No, Cory, that's not what happened and there was no "promise." The new theory of anti-trust was "consumer harm." Hi…

> No, Cory, those are not "operating costs," those are called "capital costs." They're treated real differently in Accounting.

I'm guessing he's aware that's how things work currently; it sounded to me like he was arguing that it shouldn't work that way, although I don't know if he literally believes that accounting practices should change or if that was more just for rhetorical effect.

Re: The monopoly strategy behind the Google/Microsoft mobile patent wars

#63

Post by webmaven » Sat, Oct 23, 2021, 2:53 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #60

webmaven wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that there are sites that use fragment identifiers to encode state, and users may be including fragments mistakenly (eg. click a link in a Wikipedia page's TOC, scroll to the top, share link), figuring out what to do with some random URL submission that includes a fragment isn't straightforward. In THEORY, when the fragment is (semantically?) significant, the site could dynamically alter the link rel="canonical…

We're indeed replacing links with canonical URLs now, as of maybe a month ago. But we were stripping anchors from URLs even before that, with a list of exempted sites. I've added pluralistic.net to that list now. If there's a better way to do it, I'm interested.

> If there's a better way to do it, I'm interested.

About the only thing I could suggest would be to add a checkbox to the submission form that controlled fragment-preserving vs stripping, but you would probably need to add a review queue to double check it wasn't being abused (not that abuse is a particularly attractive target, in this case), and I am unsure whether the minor additional code and UI complexity is worth it vs. the ad-hoc process you have now.

A second possible approach would be to invert that suggestion and simply add a review queue to check whether a removed fragment should have been preserved instead (ordering or filtering the queue by the rank of the submission rather than chronological order, for sanity purposes).

Re: The monopoly strategy behind the Google/Microsoft mobile patent wars

#64

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sun, Oct 24, 2021, 11:28 PM UTC

Nasrudith wrote: post #57

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're asking for citations to things that happen behind closed doors. "Big company pressures little company into a buyout/capitulation" is bad PR for big company, so part of the buyout/capitulation is to sign the NDA.

There are still conspiracy theory leaker mathematics in play here. Facebook can't so much as send an internal email complaining about leaks making somebody's job harder without it being trumpted as yet another great wrong they committed. It is within a space of possibilities but a sustained lack of evidence decreases the probability of it being so as numbers increase. It is possible that a given person drove drunk wi…

If you disclose your identity then you're violating the NDA and get sued. If you don't, nobody wants to run the story because you have no credibility.

Also, how many times does this have to happen before it's a problem? Maybe it's not thousands of times. If it happens each of the small number of times that someone would otherwise have the opportunity to unseat a monopoly, that's still really bad.

Re: The monopoly strategy behind the Google/Microsoft mobile patent wars

#65

Post by dredmorbius » Tue, Oct 26, 2021, 6:08 AM UTC

huitzitziltzin wrote: post #13

Cory Doctorow is ignorant of economics and competition policy. It’s frustrating to see his thoughts shared here so often. There is no credible economic theory of firm “power seeking”. What’s more, you don’t need such a theory to explain what’s going on here. If you want to explain why Google paid so much for Motorola, you can do so via the various defects in intellectual property law. All large firms are at least occ…

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/97802034...