Comment by exabrial
3 years ago
Want R&D? Oppose monopolies. Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and possibly others all need to be broken up into smithereens.
There seems to be bipartisan support for this but current leadership is once again distracted buying voters rather than solving hard problems (typical for no matter who is in power).
And yet TFA is in large part about how government backed monopolies can and did give rise to significant R&D ....
It's always tough to tell, because we don't have a comparison to anything else. Maybe society would've seen more innovation under the same circumstances without the government backed monopoly. That you can get X units of innovation even within the government is not controversial, I think. It's whether you can get more than X units with the same input without government (or monopolist).