Comment by clairity
4 years ago
as i understand it, by not communicating directly, companies avoid the most damning potential evidence that they are colluding. it's theoretically possible to still determine that their behavior is collusive, but quite difficult in practice.
i personally think anti-trust/anti-monopoly regulations should be tightened by an order of magnitude or so. any market that exhibits such extended, obviously inflated profit margins needs to be sliced up more finely. any market participant with more than ~10% market share should be scrutinized closely. piercing the corporate veil should be the norm with any anticompetitive infraction (as well as embezzlement, insider trading, and other such executive crimes).
in short, make markets fair (not just 'free').
and in turn, that should allocate capital more efficiently throughout the economy, rather than letting it accumulate inefficiently in fewer and fewer hands.
"Fair" and "free" are almost opposite values in regards to markets, what you want is not "free", you want regulation. Fairness means you got to oppress a party in favor of another party.
a fair market is one that is devoid of coercive influence by any market participant, almost diametrically opposed to oppressiveness. whereas in a "free" market, oppression is the expected steady-state, because it inherently invites manipulation to produce advantage, as with any game (in the academic sense) without rules. try playing basketball without rules and see what happens.
It seems you are making up words. "Fair market" doesn't even seem to be a thing - not surprised really.
You are hitting the nail on the head. Most times, people are looking for utopian solutions. In a large market where people have different incentives, non-dominating solutions do not exist. There are options and implications. We get to choose from what we have (with implications) not some ideal situation we have dreamt in our mind. Currently, everyone wants to have their cake, eat it and the cherry on the top. Later even complain about the cherry not being sweet.
This is "mah free market" perspective where 'freedom' is the law of the jungle.
They somehow think that this brand of 'freedom' without regulation will not decent into rule of the strongest and basically tyrany, just like it has every time in history.
They have not heard about standard oil market manipulation, railway monopolies, the Phoebus Cartel and others
They do not understand that regulation is what stands in the way of other people taking your freedoms.
> in short, make markets fair (not just 'free').
I'm all for it. What's your concrete proposal to change in the current law for digital store distribution "tax"?
you don't necessarily need new laws, just executive will to allocate earnest resources (diverted from, say, useless programs like the tsa or military boondoggle projects) put toward robustly promoting competitive markets.
for instance, make platforms like apple allow other app stores equal footing on their platform. then they would have to compete on price and features to get the best apps to be on their app store rather than resting on their laurels of being the only viable option. apple already has lots of advantages, so they don't need monopoly power on top of that to be able to compete effectively.
Yea you can force them to have multiple markets on the phone but that doesn’t mean that they won’t be colluding again. Apple and Google can have their stores on both iOS and Android and still keep 30%.
Also this would mean that you are killing off a feature to the end user (me in this case) where I actually like the walled garden as I don’t need to check and verify apps I download.
I understand where you are coming from but if I bought an iOS device (for my parents) I want them to not have a way to install other apps. For me that’s a feature. I don’t want there to be a way to enable anything that allows them to side load or use a different store. This is me as a consumer.
As a developer I see it like this: my (potential) customers decided to use Apple for a reason. I have to respect their decision. If that means I make 30% less than I can try and convince them to use Android and side load but I should respect their choice. Would I like the 30% off for myself - sure.
I think a big part of the discussion misses the reason ppl have chosen iOS and the arguments come from only one side.
If we can get to a position that makes sure that you keep you current state (gatekeeper + trust in iOS App Store + can’t get scammed with malware apps) but allows the option to distribute outside of that would be ideal but I’m too stupid to think of it :D
I just don’t want to kill off a feature I paid a huge amount of money (iOS devices for every close family member) to have and I feel that should be respected. :)
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