Comment by Matticus_Rex
2 years ago
There's also a pretty large econ literature questioning that it actually benefited the consumer, much of which concludes that in cases where the trust's anticompetitive power didn't itself rest on government-granted monopolies, it probably hurt.
You know all the incredible inventions that came out of Bell Labs (eg the telephone, the transistor, the C programming language)?
Yup, all those happened when they were an uber-monopoly and had the resources and breathing space to fund such bets!
That's because the government's definition of anti-competitive is ticky-tacky and is rooted in bullshit.
US anti-competitive policy and enforcement has always been dancing around the double standards of who can do market manipulation, the double standards of white collar crime enforcement, the double standards of "consumer benefit" in a capitalist system, etc.
"Consumer benefit" for example is a cowardly way to say price controls. Consumer benefit is inversely correlated with price. That implies the US government should be doing price controls and setting acceptable profit margins for everyone, but in practice due to the enforcement issues and the way the law is constructed it means that the government regulates prices only in extremely detailed technical cases.
Meaning you can manipulate consumer benefit AKA prices AKA extract profits all you want as long as you don't get into these narrowly defined, often unenforced technical cases.
In fact all of these charges or facsimiles of them existed in different forms 10 years ago, they were there on launch 15 years ago. Apple is being sued now simply because other large powerful interests like Epic games, don't like the revenue split rules on the App store.
Most of these laws are written not as regulations, but ways not to regulate.
Well, price controls really are bad, actually. But Lina Khan does seem to want to push FTC governance into that realm.
> price controls really are bad,
Citation needed and not from some ooga booga free marketer.
Price control schemes exist in almost every country and in the US, every subsidy is a form of price control. Price controls are not just ceilings and floors. The Prime Interest rate is a price control for money. Ration cards are price controls.
The reason that price controls are dangerous to an economy (esp. a capitalist one) is typically that if you're controlling for price (via floor and ceiling) you have to also control for distribution. Price controlled goods must be distributed as a nonprofit service with limits rather than a for profit enterprise. That's often the "fuck up" that's most cited but that's a "learn basic economics" issue.
Literally that was Nixon's entire fuck up, and it was compounded by the death of Bretton Woods. Price controls worked just fine before/during/after WWI and WWII.
Public transit is the most obvious form of price controls that work because the distribution and the commodity/service are both run as a nonprofit service.
Also if you care about the whole 'OMG BLACK MARKETS' thing, see distribution, and understand that if you have a price that actually represents the cost of delivering a commodity to a consumer, a black market forming around that commodity is the same kind of market as a "free market". It is simply dudes trying to get the most amount of profit for arbitrage of a good they get at cost.
Also "subsidies don't work", the subsidy often not a consumer subsidy it's a producer profit subsidy. See EV's which all have subsidies built into their price except the Leaf.
You see the problem here? In order to actually do this correctly and have the desired effect on consumers, you need everyone to open their books. That's not going to happen in a capitalist system. So their alternative is "get lucky". Private profit guides economic policy more than the actual data or methodology.
The more interesting thing of "regulation" here. Is if the government can effectively regulate a company's backlog. Apple's walled garden is intentionally constructed on their side such that there cannot be competition because the controls for such competition are unbuilt. The PWA issue in the EU shows that if you take them at face value which I would having worked with Apple products and done a bit of jail breaking back in the day. So effectively they need to create public features for supporting alternative wallets in a secure way.
Outside of iMessage, wallets are the only real thing the gov has to stand on.
Super apps are just a semantic exercise.
Cloud-streaming is a non-issue Apple doesn't compete in a cloud streaming vertical. Apple Arcade is just a subscription to an app store. They don't stream the games.
The Smart Watches thing is also bunk. Samsung does the same thing, with watches and headphones. If I switch to a Google Pixel my headphones lose features. Unless the government is in the mood to create and regulate open tech standards this a nothing burger.
It's in practice arguing that Apple cannot have a private SDK which I would be fine with but they're not actually arguing that.
The reason that this is not like US vs MS is because MS's settlement did not result in forcing MS to CHANGE the code, only allowing OEM's to bundle other browsers. US vs MS in practicality was just a big nothing burger. Not even the EU government is in a place to regulate and enforce Open APIs.
Also speaking of ooga booga free marketers. Milton Friedman predicted that US vs MS is going to be a dark age of government regulation of tech and prevent innovation. Lmao.
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