One issue I foresee, similar to how local business groups inevitably get overwhelmed with real-estate agents, is that this venture will get overwhelmed with complaints against ISPs and other utilities.

Unfortunately, this subject area is full of strong emotions and opinions that make it hard for people to be objective.

For example the article you link says that Google and Blackberry worked jointly on the 1:1 format phone, and jointly decided to stop working on it. That hardly sounds like an abusive monopolist.

And sure, at that point Android was more popular than the BlackBerry OS. But this actually demonstrates healthy competition. I had a Blackberry for work (edit to clarify: running BlackBerry’s own OS and software), and so did all my coworkers. Blackberry was the dominant mobile platform once. Through complacency and poor decision-making, they stopped innovating and competing. And thus, allowed new products with zero installed base on day one to come in and take their market.

I actually think it's not possible to be objective on that matter, hence it needs to be properly explained, to understand the limitations of one post (but the goal is to have many posts, so hopefully readers can reject the ones they feel is wrong)

> For example the article you link says that Google and Blackberry worked jointly on the 1:1 format phone, and jointly decided to stop working on it. That hardly sounds like an abusive monopolist.

Let's just say that I've seen a bit of first-hand, and a lot of second-hand of "Google working jointly with XXX", and in the vast majority, Google-side doesn't spend much engineering time on those issues. I completely agree this is not an objective point of view. This can hardly be proved, shown or explained, so I have no issue with you not taking my word for it. Hopefully if other people join this project, there might turn out /some/ people that you do trust?

> And sure, at that point Android was more popular than the BlackBerry OS. But this actually demonstrates healthy competition. I had a Blackberry for work, and so did all my coworkers. Blackberry was the dominant mobile platform once.

I wouldn't exactly call the replacement of BBOS by Android a "healthy competition", when the main reason Android won was that it was an OS completely free of charge, paid for by another recurring stream for the company. (I'm not saying Android was worse than BBOS, that I have no idea, )

> Through complacency and poor decision-making, they stopped innovating and competing. And thus, allowed new products with zero installed base on day one to come in and take their market.

That's irrelevant, and belongs to opinions.

RIM’s complacency and flat-footed response to the iPhone has been very well covered, and can be Googled. By the time they were trying to partner with Google, it was already too late for them. Android is not what killed the Blackberry.

Other sources, such as Chet Haas's book, make it clear that what became the G1 was already on the roadmap. It was just prioritized.

The elephant in the room is the heavy natural monopoly on software compatibility/interoperability, and the above thought experiment only makes sense because Android is a purportedly open platform.

Effective tech anti-trust has to work around that and not merely police behavior aimed at restricting competition. I'd personally say that modern tech anti-trust should be focused around mandating open access to proprietary systems (for starters, anything a web user can do, a program running on the user's behalf should be able to do), and privacy legislation to make it so that customers have to be earned rather than everyone being treated as a data subject by default.

It seems what you’re envisioning has a ton of overlap with his work covering monopolies.

I’m sure you two could work some magic together.

https://mattstoller.substack.com/

Do it and post it on here. Just be prepared to be flagged a lot.

I think it would be very interesting to explore the boundaries of monopoly, and to look at cases where monopolies are probably a good thing.

For instance, trademarks are a monopoly, but I don’t think many of us want any company to be able to co-opt brand names. That seems pretty clear.

Getting less obvious, IP-protected interfaces like GoPro mounts or those dumb Kureig coffee pods. Nobody likes those proprietary interfaces, and they do give monopoly control, but are they economically bad?

And how about console games, where all of the makers subsidize low Hw margins (therefore higher sales) with monopoly control and a cut of game publishing. Would the market be better if that was prohibited?

It’s going to be pretty easy to dunk on obviously harmful monopolies. It might be more interesting to explore more nuanced cases.

Well, my current conclusion with my post is that wording is very very hard :-). What I said is "I want to show small-ish negative impact of a big tech monopoly". It will not prove it's all bad, even though it'll only give examples of where this is bad

> I think it would be very interesting to explore the boundaries of monopoly, and to look at cases where monopolies are probably a good thing.

Let's just say that the current tendency is to think that monopolies are fine, and I'd like to help reverting that. Yes your examples are worst discussing, and I have some of my own.

For instance, I definitely acknowledge that Android's monopoly helped whole unrelated sectors. But I also believe that innovation would be much better served if Android was opensource-in-spirit and maintained by something like the Linux Foundation.

> It’s going to be pretty easy to dunk on obviously harmful monopolies.

If it was, they would already have been ruled illegal? In Europe, I can't really name any "obviously harmful monopolies"

I don't think anyone disagrees that monopolies are cancer.

The hard part is coming up with a targeted cure that attacks monopolies without hurting innovation.

So far that seems impossible. Almost like monopolies are a natural result of innovation.

This is basically what he is doing except uncovering a monopoly in depth takes months, not a day. Amazing work.

E.g. here for cheerleading monopoly article he wrote

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-a-cheerleading-monopo...