Once upon a time...


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Posted by David Sherman on Monday, November 03, 2008 at 14:21:20 :

In Reply to: Okay, you're a communist. posted by 48PW on Monday, November 03, 2008 at 13:21:09 :

The citizens decided that having a "choice" between shipping one's produce to market on the one railroad in the area (paying whatever Jay Gould felt like charging), and carrying it to Chicago on your back wasn't really a choice, nor was the "choice" between buying oil from Standard Oil (and paying whatever John D. Rockefeller felt like charging), and not having any oil at all. So, they passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (I always liked that name, for some reason) to ensure that there would always be honest competition in any given industry. We seem to be comfortable with the definition of "industry" when it's something old fashioned like coal, steel, railroads, oil, or even airlines, and with making sure no one company can every buy out all the competition, but with internet businesses, we're quite content to let one company control an entire market -- online auctions, for example.

I don't honestly know where to draw the line, but capitalism doesn't work well when one company has an entire industry locked up. It hurts other businesses, which in turn hurts everyone. I look at the Internet and I see some segments, like weather reports or personals ads, where there are several companies competing fair and square, and then I see others where one company has locked up the whole market, usually by patenting really bizarre "intellectual property" like the blind bidding on Travelocity or "buy it now" on Ebay. During its heyday, the Sherman Anti-Trust act was used to to break up conglomerates that we wouldn't think twice about nowadays. They forced Weyerhaeuser to split from Potlatch, for example, and they forced Boeing to spin off United Airlines. By those standards, Microsoft and Ebay are clearly monopolies.

But I do understand what you're saying that there are at least theoretically sort of alternatives to Microsoft's OS and Ebay's auction service, even if they're pretty poor ones. On the other hand, I'm sure that in Rockefeller's day, it was possible, if you worked at it, to by some oil from somebody other than Standard Oil, or in Boeing/United's day to fly on somebody else's airplane.

If nothing else, some of these Internet and software companies should be stripped of their very dubious patents for things that are either obvious or are mere business practices, not real inventions. At least that would keep them from using the threat of expensive lawsuits to intimidate potential rivals.



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