Comment by _pi
2 years ago
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.
To put it more precisely, price controls create market distortions and Pareto inefficiency. Though I think they are worth the cost in some instances, they aren’t a scalable solution to anything. Also, it’s almost impossible to know what the “correct” price of a good should be because the factors that determine that are part of a very complex network.
3 replies →
>every subsidy is a form of price control. Price controls are not just ceilings and floors.
You make many points and I didn't read the whole thread bellow but on this point specifically I think you are wrong especially in the context of GP which was saying that price controls are not effective. What GP means is that actual price controls are not effective. So I don't see how redefining price controls here is meaningful. That is, it would not be fair to say, for example, that since things that are "a form of price control," however we define that, are effective, therefore true price controls are also effective. So I don't see why you are trying to redefine this word here. And it is obvious that GP means price ceilings and floors. And, importantly, that's what people mean by the term. For example that is how Wikipedia defines it.[0] Also importantly, that's what the phrase literally means. If you subsidize something, you did not control the price as someone can still charge more for it after subsidies. They just won't choose to due to market forces. Even then if you only subsidize one company then they will not lower prices assuming that the scale effeciency created by more buyers does not provide more profit than keeping the current price. I suppose you can say that since the market force is so strong that the government giving subsidies amounts to literal price control. But this is obviously a very different meaning, and since it is not the common usage it makes no sense to define it that way in this one comment. Additionally, by that same token we would have to define every market action as a form of price control. So my point here is that nobody defines subsidies as price control and it makes no sense to do so from both a linguistic and economic standpoint.
>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.
I don't know who you're quoting here or what this paragraph is saying. But I didn't see GP say subsidies don't work. And nobody has said that price controls not working amounts to subsidies not working. Subsidies obviously work and have been shown to work for decades. Not in all cases does it work, but many times it has worked and the outcome is one that would most likely not have occurred in a completely free market. And this shouldn't be surprising as using capital to grow a company is one of the main 'discoveries' of Capitalism along with the division of labor. The only issue is that you lose market signals and you have to increase taxes. Government-free markets and Capitalism are not the same thing. To deny this is to say that the East India Company was not a form of Capitalism as it had government mandated monopolies over several markets.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_controls
2 replies →