It is not a 'solved problem'. Price controls are not easy for anyone to manage. Companies can easily find ways around them in many cases. Enabling companies to categorize themselves as 'platforms' or otherwise and then stipulating both benefits and requirements based on those labels makes a lot of sense comparatively. The general problem though is that the government isn't typically using regulations to improve freedom and competition.
The government looks at regulation as a way to extract money, so solutions that encourage competition on a level playing field through market forces like OP's aren't given fair consideration. AnthonyMouse 48 days ago root parent prev next [—]. Nothing Apple does is a natural monopoly. Artificial monopolies can be maintained through vertical integration. If you don't like their app store, use another one. If all they provide is the app store, that's easy, and every platform would have half a dozen or more.
But if using a different app store requires you to develop your own operating system, and convince millions of third party developers to make applications for it even before it has any users, and make your own hardware, on and on, well then it's infeasible to make a competing app store and you get an uncompetitive and abusive market.
The solution there isn't to regulate it like a utility, it's to break up the company so that the operating system isn't made by the same company as the app store and has no reason to restrict the users to only the one.
Then you have competition again and don't need any regulation other than the constraint on vertical integration. What is relevant is that the App Store is a natural monopoly within the iOS ecosystem. As long as Apple has such significant market power including a substantial market share, especially as a percentage of revenue, not just units sold their natural monopoly on the iOS platform will extend to them being a willing participant in an oligopoly.
Said state of affairs is the expected outcome of Apple having a natural monopoly and there being only one other substantial mobile OS market participant, who just so happens to also operate a natural monopoly for app sales - albeit a much, much more tenuous one. That's very much not a natural monopoly, but a constraint that is forced onto the ecosystem by Apple. There is no technical reason for it existing, but it exists by design.
Absolutely not a solved problem. The utilities have no reason to innovate at that point. In my local municipality I have no way to choose renewable energy apart from building my own power plant on my roof. The regulating bodies of those utilities work hard to create incentives for them to innovate.
I spent four years of my career working on energy programs with major utilities around the country in which they tried to incentive reductions in energy usage. Which is a curious statement: why would a electrical utility want people to use less electricity?
The reason is because the regulatory agencies created incentives within the regulatory framework to encourage them to do it. Basically the regulators start with an outcome, bake that outcome into how utilities get paid, and then let the utility innovate to figure out how to do it.
This led to meaningful reduction in energy usage across many markets. I'd love to hear more, what kinds of incentives? Is it something like, "if you get X efficiency, you get N more dollars"?
There are a bunch of different models but they mostly come down to the regulatory agency IE: the PUC creating a pot of money for utilities that is paid out when they reach energy reduction goals. You can learn more by looking into Demand Response programs and Demand Management programs around the country. There's no such thing as choosing renewable energy on a grid. Energy is fungible. If you get on one of those "choose green" schemes, you're just getting the same energy but also buying some credits from somewhere else.
What incentive does the app store have to innovate now? It's not something that should be a choice. The government should move as much power to renewable as fast as possible and you should just keep getting power. This idea of "choice" for a commodity based on how it was produced not based on any features is crazy and will never work.
What's wrong with your local power provider not incorporating renewables? There are still solar installers, and it probably a better deal overall to own your own plant, as it were. My city recently forced every resident into an esoteric market-based solution for electricity sold with a pack of lies about renewable energy and reduced rates that required explicit opt-out to avoid and stay with the provider who actually generates power and services the people on its infrastructure.
Scoundreller 48 days ago root parent next [—]. Which city? There's no historical evidence of natural monopolies existing at the scale of cities. There are multiple American examples of decades long competition in utilities.
The economic rationale for politicians to give their friends local monopolies long postdates the practice of doing so. In such industries, the theory goes, a single producer will eventually be able to produce at a lower cost than any two other producers, thereby creating a "natural" monopoly. Higher prices will result if more than one producer supplies the market.
Avoiding such inconveniences is another reason offered for government franchise monopolies for industries with declining long-run average total costs.
The truth is that the monopolies were created decades before the theory was formalized by intervention-minded economists, who then used the theory as an ex post rationale for government intervention. At the time when the first government franchise monopolies were being granted, the large majority of economists understood that large-scale, capital intensive production did not lead to monopoly, but was an absolutely desirable aspect of the competitive process.
The price the users pay to Facebook is their privacy and attention. What would a price cap for that look like? Better plan? How about we stop letting tech companies reach "monopoly scale"? The market is globally competitive. How would expect tech companies to compete if you have policies that continuously place them at a disadvantage against global competitors.
Tariffs don't solve these problems either. OP's suggestion is pretty decent idea relative to playing wack a mole with price fixing while trying to make sure your country's corps can compete on the global market. If national governments are going to allow companies to be trans-national, then we clearly need trans-national regulatory authorities.
This isn't rocket science. People act like corporations are immutable acts of divine intervention. They are an artifact we create and we are free as a society to change their parameters however we wish.
It's not a free market, it has never been a free market, and this is just another part of a market that should also be regulated. We can look at a map of most popular messaging apps per country in the light of todays downtime and see that they don't or they compete with themselves. It also shows the only places where competition can grow to a scale where it can even hope to start competing and survive is where there's first a protectionist policy in place favoring domestic players.
I agree, but there may be certain things like electric power grids, sewer systems, messaging systems, high bandwidth ISPs, where it may not make a lot of sense to have two or not two in a particular geographic location.
In that sense you may need some regulation. Sure, but why limit this to tech companies? Let's also apply this to banks, landlords, governments, grocery chains, and employers in general. Why should I not get the best wages, negotiated employment agreement, interest rates, lease terms, and deal with the IRS on taxes that I really don't want to pay as my most successful peer?
Banks bend over backwards for their VIP customers, why shouldn't they do the same for me? My neighbours didn't get a rent increase this month because my landlord likes them, why should I have to negotiate for getting the same thing? And would love to see this sort of thing codified in law. You snark, but legally preventing banks from offering better rates to favored clients would probably be a good thing for society and the banks themselves. After all, plenty of charming and well liked clients have turned out to be terrible credit risks.
Favored clients in this case aren't slick guys in a suit, I'm talking about people who want the bank to manage billions of dollars for them, as compared to me and my shitty savings account that may or may not have any money in it. FormerBandmate 48 days ago root parent prev next [—]. Credit scores are a very good thing. The concept is fine.
The implementation is garbage in the US , and insufficiently transparent. But we don't. All rules and regulations are arbitrary to an extent. We have different rules depending on the situation, the entity, etc.
We get to pick and choose the rules that we think will benefit society the most. Might be too broad. Especially as the scale gets smaller I think that non-quantitative aspects can reasonably affect who you want to do business with. For example, if I'm annoying and rude to my local mechanic and he starts charging me extra to deal with my bullshit I don't really see a problem with that.
There does start to be a problem however if he's the only mechanic in town or if he charges more or less based on race or some other protected class. I think it's a very hard in general to find the balance on problems like this one, and I don't expect you can come up with a one size fits all rule. Having this requirement when dealing with tech monopolies is uniquely helpful because in some cases there is no alternative.
We can always rent, shop or bank other places. I'd argue where there isn't a thriving marketplace of choice monopolies should have to have the same rules with all their partners.
You can always use other software as well. The only reason HN believe Apple to be a monopoly is because the product they purchased does what it was advertised to do - security through chain of trust via an good-but-imperfect organization. It's only a legal monopoly if the courts say so, and the judge in Epic v Apple defined the market in a way that actually made sense - they aren't a monopoly on mobile game purchases, but they did took anticompetitive actions in that market to stifle competition.
They can't have a monopoly on iPhones because the iPhone isn't a market - it's a device where the App Store is the killer feature. There are other products you can buy that compete with the iPhone and its app store. I'd argue that represents a monopoly in paid smartphones. Our option as users is either buy a phone from Apple or accept what is essentially a free service from Google you have to buy the hardware This to me doesn't represent a thriving marketplace of user choice.
Dracophoenix 48 days ago root parent next [—]. It's been demonstrated for years that iPhone users are much more likely to pay for apps. It's possible to be extremely profitable and not have a monopoly on the market because the iPhone isn't just an appliance but a Veblen good as well. It does however mean Apple has significant market power. Almost by definition: in a very counterfactual perfectly competitive smartphone market, everyone sells at cost and there aren't any profits.
Reducing it to monopoly vs. And I don't really think iPhones are a Veblen good exactly. Targeted at higher-income buyers? Valued as much for design as aesthetics? I agree with everything you just said but without the irony.
Any of those a monopoly? Technically or reasonably speaking? CPLX 48 days ago parent prev next [—]. That -sounds- simple, but it isn't, and in reality any company would easily bypass that by simply creating other companies to take some of the revenue. They already do that to avoid international taxes.
As an example, the US charges tax on all income coming to a US company so companies have entities in countries like Ireland and Luxembourg to keep that money out of the US government's reach. And it's the same thing here.
Taxes aren't easy. And calling a company that sells phones a "society-destroying problem" is a bit hyperbolic, don't you think? CPLX 48 days ago root parent next [—]. It would require pages of statute as well as regulatory guidance, and some of the most wealthy and capable forces in our modern world would be arrayed against it trying to avoid and evade the rules.
None of those things make the proposal impossible however. It would be a dismal society indeed if we unilaterally surrendered to every instance of centralized malevolent power without a fight. So what happens to the company spending They just get a net loss of 0. ArcelorMittal is a major steel provider. They had a tough year though, so their final net loss was actually about half a billion. Under your proposal, they would have lost 43 billion dollars. Uh oh, you just collapsed the steel industry.
Cederfjard 48 days ago root parent next [—]. I assume the idea is that large companies such as this would have a period of time to scale down operations to the largest size where it still makes sense, and then more competitors would pop up to take over the market share they leave behind. It's a silly idea because plenty of companies have high revenue and low profit or net loss , and are not anti-competitive in the slightest.
An arbitrary revenue cap doesn't help the situation at all, as evidenced by the steel company. Disincentivizing growth is Splitting up ArcelorMittal is a fucking great idea. Our competitive landscape is being absolutely choked by anti-competitive behavior, monopoly, and single point of failure problems in supply chains, labor markets, commodities markets, and everything else. I am sympathetic to your argument, but it would be stronger if you didn't project the "why" onto a large group of people.
It's pretty clear that the reasons are complex, nuanced, and possibly only a problem at scales most of us never encourage. I think there are probably also benefits of the large size, e. Walmart has completely changed what you can buy for low prices, which has incredible value to many people Also, I'm not sure the SPOF problems are a result of anti-competitive behavior - AIUI, it's because JIT delivery between different entities is far more cost effective, and the human brain tends to ignore hidden risks.
And as citizens of Apple's home nation, it greatly benefits us that those high-quality jobs are available. Apple would probably move down to simply offering just phones and apps only and removing everything else. I know that sounds good in theory, but there are indirect benefits for these other services that they offer, in addition to jobs. It also bolster's California's economy all the way down to bodegas, bars, restaurants, and hobby shops.
It's an interesting thought experiment at least. What would the hidden incentives of something like that be? For example, if a company wanted to keep growing, it would have to split organically into separate corporate entities. What would stop them establishing "favored" relationships with each other?
Say for example Facebook splits out "Zuckerburg data centers inc" - what's to stop them pricing themselves above market to avoid taking on other customers, and then giving FB a hefty discount? You could mandate that there be no board overlap, but shareholders would probably receive a split. You'd need to actually draft a law rather than write it on a napkin and there would be armies of very well paid lawyers trying to avoid it, but that's common to any attempt to break up concentrated power.
In that context it wouldn't be all that hard. You'd need to figure out some definitions for common ownership, joint enterprise, and so on. A lot of those laws and definitions already exist. It's only really in the last few decades that we've abandoned antitrust law but we have successfully done things like this in the past.
When have we capped the potential revenue of companies successfully in the past? I've never heard of it. If Zuckerberg data centers wants to keep growing, then at some point they will have to find external customers. Thats actually what a lot of firms do, and what was really prominant in the Cannabis industry; Cannabis companies couldnt do "real banking" do to federal shenanigans.
So instead why dispensaries would do, is make another LLC who buys the building and all the building permits that are municipally regulated - then as the municipality zoned and approved locations and projects for dispensaries and distribution licenses which had a multitude of their own specific restrictions They would then rent the facilities for ridiculous rental amounts which the rental company would legally be able to put into any regular bank - then make loans to the cannabis companies and dispensaries for whatever operating expenses were needed.
This got really ugly when Med Men, based out of LA, was made really public because of douchebaggery happening in the company revealing how they had been gaming their own investors etc EastOfTruth 48 days ago root parent next [—].
You got to start the discussion somewhere For me, I t think that it should be related to the number of employees. A cap on employees would probably be a negative thing, but a cap on revenue per employee would incentivise hiring people. EastOfTruth 48 days ago root parent prev next [—].
Brian X. Soon Apple will help you fix it yourself. TechCircle : Apple to allow users right to repair, amid growing regulatory pressure in the west. Here's why. Way back in , I was trying to fix my clamshell iBook and googled for the service manual. Initially for the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 lineups, and soon to be followed by Mac computers featuring M1 chips. This is huge—what we've been working towards for nearly 20 years. This is far off the requirements of righttorepair but proves that legislators are on the right track making similar requirements more broadly.
Wonder what changed? RightToRepair is breaking through. Massive security and safety risks. Apple just undermined all of that. Given that iPhones got thicker to hold bigger batteries, I wouldn't say it could never happen. In other words, it's been a tough year to see that we can use democracy to solve our problems.
But I also see signs of hope. Great work! We organized them. We built a network in support. I'm sure parts will be pricey. Also wondering if it'll allow you to purchase whatever parts you want or lock it down to the device you own.
And no company has fought harder than iFixit, which makes excellent products. Apple essentially flooded their market by going direct to consumer.
This great for Consumers, great for Apple, great for Authorized repair Looots of interesting nuance, thoughts, and questions from an actual AASP technicians perspective.
While overall, I think this is heading in the right direction, there's still a ton of stuff people not in the field are going to overlook. Recalling that time like 12 years ago when I trucked out to a Virginia Apple store to see if they could fix an old iPod. They told me I should trade it in and buy a newer one. How much do you think they're going to charge for a screwdriver or pry tool to repair it? This was and has always been about money.
Apple will sell parts for repairing phones directly to individuals It's also telling that Apple will concede to regulatory pressure on repair but is fighting tooth and nail on App Store fees. Regulatory involvement in three continents, dozens of proposed bills, investor proposals, and Apple blinked. Will have to see how far they go with it though.
More than that, it's going to redistribute the aftermarket service landscape. Apple is effectively saying gray market repair is an industry it can't police. Will the existence of this program start informing future iPhone design decisions in order to make the product simpler to repair? I mean I doubt it, but that would be cool!
Apple's new Self Service Repair will give consumers access to parts, tools and information needed to do repairs on their own. Apple's first step toward making parts and tools available to the repair community is pro-customer and pro-environment. Apple's heavy-handed stance against it was way out of sync with their cultivated pro-consumer, pro-environment persona.
Work specific productivity commands. An mdBook preprocessor that reads from stdin, replaces emoji shortcodes with code points, and outputs to stdout. Simple terminal application which lets the user select between its input arguments and prints out the the selected choice.
A niftly little helper program creating reimbursement requests in pdf form from a csv or commandline. Trash is a command-line application for moving files and folders into the trash. A safer alternative to rm. A version of sort uniq - c with output that updates in real-time as each line is parsed. Cross-compile, package and deploy AWS Lambda functions with only docker as a dependency using cargo aws-lambda.
A command-line tool for detecting and optionally correcting files with incorrect extensions. Create changelog for your releases and full changelog for your projects using Conventional Commits. A program to create passwords like in xkcd.
The file has to have one word per line. One seperator should be a special character. The other seperator should be a number. Cargo Faaaaaak! What you need is better tools, Cargo Faaaaaak!
Build your tech radar as code. Write human readable blips and use the tw open source radar to visualize. A library and an associated executable, the library provides tools for building tools that can parse and work for VCF and FASTA files while the associated executable is a command line…. Part of TuringArena: tools to create programming challenges. Yet another password generator in Rust.
Generates a random password and copies it to the clipboard. A small utility to verify the data integrity of a downloaded file with its expected checksum. A simple windows clipboard cli interface. Pipe into it to copy. Pipe from it to paste.
A simple tool which monitors RabbitMQ and notifies via Slack legacy webhooks when certain thresholds are met. A versatile tool for downloading the linked contents of entire subreddits fast and efficiently. Inspired by Wunderline. Command-line utility which poll on remote addresses in order to perform status checks periodically.
Extremely simple memory stable S3 client that supports get, put, head, list, and sync. A command line utility to investigate which libraries will be found by the vcpkg Cargo build helper. Painless scaffolding of the boring part of setting up projects that people other than you can use.
Artifact is a design doc tool made for developers. It allows anyone to easily write and link their design docs both to each other and to source code, making it easy to track how complete their project is….
Prints the local or utc week in the ISO format, e. RnR is a command-line tool to rename multiple files and directories that supports regular expressions.
This is a small tool which will generate a suggestion for a server name. You may specify the domain and the name source pool as parameters. The command line tool exposes functionality to search FSTs using regular expressions…. A tiny command-line tool to calculate fundamental statistics of numbers given via stdin.
A simple command-line utility and Rust crate! A simple tool for taking notes. Work in progress. Small Rust application to create bloom filter of optimal size given a false positivity rate. Deleting the Battle. Your browser's cookies are disabled. Alot of people have a much slower loading time since 7. Disconnect and power down all devices that access the Internet like other computers, gaming systems, Netflix or other movie streaming devices, DVRs, other routers, switches, VoIP phones, mobile phones and wireless printers.
How to limit the download speed in Blizzard's Battle. This didn't used to be the case. Want to help However, just like with previous seasonal updates, this one also suffers from a slow download issue, which occurs on PC Battle.
But honestly I haven't noticed a difference. How are you running the container s? The Blizzard Battle. Want to help Open the Blizzard Battle. Blizzard Battle.
The network features both PvP and co-op for multiplayer gameplay. Updated: 1 month ago. Windows 10 users may notice performance problems caused by CPU usage. Use a wired connection. To maximize the game download rate, the maximum Network Bandwidth limit must be set to zero.
So, by limiting the internet download speed in the battle. Article ID: What can we help you with? The Battle. We always recommend checking your Network Bandwidth in the Battle. Server down or getting disconnected? Last Updated 21 seconds ago: Battle. Check whether Battle. In the Target field, insert a space after the last quotation mark and paste the text from Step 1.
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