Re:Element (Matrix chat app) suspended from the Google Play ...
by pdkl95 on Saturday January 30, 2021 @05:57AM
(#25968081)
These tech monopolies were built on adversarial interoperability!
IBM made their "PC", but a lot of Silicon Valley's growth in the 80s
and 90s happened because businesses had the freedom to innovate
adversarially, creating the IBM PC clone.
As Cory Doctorow recently explained[1]:
>> It's how we got Gateway, Dell, Compaq and all of the other PC
vendors that might have sold you that IBM PC clone in 1984 running an
operating system that IBM hadn't made, on phone lines that had been
broken up from AT&T.
>> And so it felt in those days like maybe we'd found some kind of
perfect market, a market where you could make your products with low
capital, just with the sweat of your own mind, by writing code. That
you could access the global audience of everyone who might want to run
that code over a low cost universal network. And that that audience
could switch to your product at a very low cost, because you could
always write the code that it would take to to port the old data
formats and to connect the old services to your new product. It was a
market where the best ideas would turn into companies that would find
customers and change the world.
>> as these companies acquired new monopolies, they diverted their monopoly
rents to foreclosing on competitive compatibility.
When talking about monopoly, people tend to focus on price, but modern
tech monopolies don't need to use traditional form of rent
seeking. Exploitative prices don't make sense when the monopolist
undermines the entire market with "free services". Instead, tech monopolies are
about control of what is allowed to participate in the market.
As Cory Doctorow recently explained[1]:
>> It's how we got Gateway, Dell, Compaq and all of the other PC vendors that might have sold you that IBM PC clone in 1984 running an operating system that IBM hadn't made, on phone lines that had been broken up from AT&T.
>> And so it felt in those days like maybe we'd found some kind of perfect market, a market where you could make your products with low capital, just with the sweat of your own mind, by writing code. That you could access the global audience of everyone who might want to run that code over a low cost universal network. And that that audience could switch to your product at a very low cost, because you could always write the code that it would take to to port the old data formats and to connect the old services to your new product. It was a market where the best ideas would turn into companies that would find customers and change the world.
>> as these companies acquired new monopolies, they diverted their monopoly rents to foreclosing on competitive compatibility.
When talking about monopoly, people tend to focus on price, but modern tech monopolies don't need to use traditional form of rent seeking. Exploitative prices don't make sense when the monopolist undermines the entire market with "free services". Instead, tech monopolies are about control of what is allowed to participate in the market.
[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-11337-what_the_cyberoptimists_got...