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:Nope. It's the credit supply (Score:5, Informative)
read the post i linked down in the grandparent.
MPAA controls the US news media (Score:4, Informative)
The political innovation that made markets work so well is to counterbalance them with democracy, where the guiding principle is "one person one vote" (i.e. votes can't be traded away - the opposite of markets).
Mass media broke this. The parent companies of five movie studios [pineight.com] control U.S. television news, which in turn controls the general public's awareness of issues and of candidates. Notice that TV news hasn't covered ACTA or other issues where the public could stand to gain at the expense of the MPAA or vice versa.
Governments are associated with monopolies when market forces overcome democratic forces within the government.
This has in fact happened. U.S. voters by and large do what the TV tells them.
Re:'Free market' means muddled thinking (Score:3, Informative)
Standard Oil controlled a vast majority of the refined oil market and did it without the force of government.
What a bunch of shit. I think the AC is right, you people ARE regurgitating crap from tenured socialists.
The railroad monopolies, created by the government, enabled the Standard Oil monopoly.
This is all right there in the decision by the courts in the Standard Oil anti-trust suit of 1909, where the court stated:
Almost everywhere the rates from the shipping points used exclusively, or almost exclusively, by the Standard are relatively lower than the rates from the shipping points of its competitors. Rates have been made low to let the Standard into markets, or they have been made high to keep its competitors out of markets. Trifling differences in distances are made an excuse for large differences in rates favorable to the Standard Oil Company, while large differences in distances are ignored where they are against the Standard. Sometimes connecting roads prorate on oil—that is, make through rates which are lower than the combination of local rates; sometimes they refuse to prorate; but in either case the result of their policy is to favor the Standard Oil Company. Different methods are used in different places and under different conditions, but the net result is that from Maine to California the general arrangement of open rates on petroleum oil is such as to give the Standard an unreasonable advantage over its competitors
Now stop using Standard Oil as an example of a monopoly that wasnt created through government influence. The government created the Railroad monopolies, and the railroad monopolies created the Oil monopoly.