The Monopolies That Dominate the Internet 342
Tim Wu has a piece up at the Wall Street Journal pointing out that the free-market, open Internet — "competition in its purest form" — has evolved to be dominated by monopolies. Wu argues that this is nothing new, and that each wave of information technology in the US has followed a similar pattern. "Today's Internet borders will probably change eventually, especially as new markets appear. But it's hard to avoid the conclusion that we are living in an age of large information monopolies. Could it be that the free market on the Internet actually tends toward monopolies? Could it even be that demand, of all things, is actually winnowing the online free market — that Americans, so diverse and individualistic, actually love these monopolies? ... Info-monopolies tend to be good-to-great in the short term and bad-to-terrible in the long term."
Re:It's crashing the economy (Score:2, Funny)
Excuse me? China (and to a very lesser extent Europe, you probably mean mostly Germany) are 'eating' your lunch because the gov't created monopolies destroyed competition in USA by using gov't as means to destroy free market and to get themselves all the subsidies and regulations that keep out the new startups, so then once the economy became global the monopolies could easily outsource the labor to cheaper locations.
But if the market in US was actually free and gov't didn't destroy the liberties in it: didn't take away capital through income tax, didn't impose regulations and rules that prevent businesses from starting and succeeding, didn't create the unbearable expectations of social net without actually having any way to pay for such obligations and because of that creating huge pyramid scams like SS and medicare and THEN because of these scams destroying the currency and eventually credit affordability of US private market, then US would still be producing.
Take the minimum wage as an example, it's not really hugely important but it does show the destructive force of gov't intervention into free market:
1. Minimum wage prices certain people out of market, out of jobs, out of apprenticeships.
2. Minimum wage kills certain jobs, jobs that are NOT worth paying over certain amount, over minimum wage in this case.
3. Minimum wage puts labor into competition not only with labor but also with capital, so instead of only competing with another worker, you have to compete with money that can be spent to automate the job away.
Now, certainly automation is inevitable, but it does compete with labor costs.
If a machine to wash floors by itself costs half a million dollars and a person costs 15K/year, then it doesn't make sense to buy the machine.
However if the person costs 50K/year total, then maybe it DOES make sense to look into buying the machine and amortizing it over 10 years especially if it's possible to get cheap money coming out of gov'ts wazoo.
China and the rest of productive labor in the world are an actual productive part of economy, while US and most of Europe are really not that productive at all when all regulations and rules and social obligations etc. are compared!
So obviously Asia will see economies growing and US and most of Europe will see economies shrinking and dying because they are borrowing (which by the way is a way to tax you in the future, so it's a deferred tax + interest) and they are printing (which is killing the fiat currencies very quickly and it is taxing people who are mostly invested into those currencies, so people who live paycheck to paycheck for example, and it's taxing the ENTIRE savings of those people, not just their income).
To fix this economics disaster that is happening and that is going to accelerate, the unproductive parts of the world need to do the following:
1. Get rid of income tax. It's crazy to tax productive work and it's a terrible idea from point of view of liberty first, and from point of view of giving money to the unproductive gov't second.
2. Get rid of all social obligations. Many believe they are entitled to SS money because they 'paid into it'. But what they don't realize is that dollars can only be spent once. 1 dollar can only be spent on 1 thing that costs 1 dollar. So if you pay taxes and supposedly some of them go to SS, but then SS is raided and money is used for other purposes by politicians elected by the people, then in principle the politicians are using the SS money to pay for other things that they promised to get elected, so the people already have gotten something for their dollars (even if they didn't want it, like Vietnam or Iraq wars for example) then they can't expect to get 2 things for 1 dollar they paid.
But the point is that if gov't actually cared about people's ability to save money and be set for their retirements and future, they wouldn't be taxing income, they would allow the people to invest the money into their own savings and businesses. Instead the
Re:De facto, or de jure? (Score:3, Funny)
Search is currently no better than it was 10, 15, 20 years ago.
20 years ago?
Really?
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BMO
Yes. 20 years ago I could very easily search all existing web sites. :-)