Yeah, you could kind of see this when Google started making Maps pay its own way, and started charging seriously for Maps API access - suddenly a host of decent alternatives sprang up, because they stopped sucking all of the oxygen out of the market.
Re:S3 isn't getting cheaper
by edmundsauto on Friday July 29, 2022 @11:25AM
(#32278154)
Itβs interesting - those financial cross-subsidies could lead to a situation where the sum(consumer_value_from_free_product) > total_consumer_harm.
Yes that's the common argument, and there's often a good chance it is better. Hard to make a generic policy when details matter a lot
Re:S3 isn't getting cheaper
by edmundsauto on Saturday July 30, 2022 @06:52PM
(#32291179)
Great point and a very underacknowledged aspect of governing.
But for me the biggest "for" argument isn't that the broken up companies will compete with each other (that makes no sense because you'd break them up along business lines where they don't compete anyway).
Instead for me it is that it removes cross subsidies both financial (as in "we can give away this loss making application because we make so much money from X) and marketing (our new product Y is inferior to the existing product Z but we can make Y the default in our other apps and then people will just use it).
This removal of cross subsidies does increase competition.
However it's possible to force the removal of cross subsidies by other means (eg, the old "force the user to be able to select the search engine in Internet Explorer" regulation etc).