Hacker News Reader

You wrote: "Now the only part I disagree with is the last part. Laws and regulations got us into this mess in the first place. These companies are huge because they can sue or prevent others from competing through laws and regulations."

I think this is dangerously wrong. It completely glosses over and overlooks the fact that economies of scale are real and larger organizations can solve larger problems.

The guy with the machine gun will win the karate tournament if the tournament has no rules. Rules are necessary to create a level playing field when power distributions are asymmetric.

You don't need laws on your side when you can just buy up your upstart competitors, or price them out of the market with loss leaders.

In this context, one of the few tools the community has to create a level playing field, is software licensing. In particular, *GPL style licenses tend to make things much fairer, by imposing rules on all parties that prevent one from profiting asymmetrically off the work of the others.

Open Source, of the permissive variety, does the opposite. Corporations can use the code as they wish and not give back to the community. Community efforts to compete are always at a disadvantage because anything good they create can be folded into the proprietary solutions. So closed, built on open, beats purely open.

>Rules are necessary to create a level playing field when power distributions are asymmetric.

It's a Catch-22 when the rules (laws written on paper) were what made the power distributions so greatly asymmetric in the first place.

This is quite obvious when studying tribal cultures as compared to civilized cultures. It's also worth noting the inherent distributed organizational design of tribal cultures as compared to the inherently centralized design of civilized cultures.

>Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized men, we didn't have any kind of prison. Because of this, we didn't have any delinquents. Without a prison, there can't be no delinquents. We had no locks nor keys therefore among us there were no thieves. When someone was so poor that he couldn't afford a horse, a tent or a blanket, he would, in that case, receive it all as a gift. We were too uncivilized to give great importance to private property. We didn't know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being was not determined by his wealth. We had no written laws laid down, no lawyers, no politicians, therefore we were not able to cheat and swindle one another. We were really in bad shape before the white man arrived and I don't know how to explain how we were able to manage without these fundamental things that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society.

-Lame Deer

Anthropology long ago over turned the "noble savage living in peace" idea that you seem to be promoting here - violence, rape and theft were and are common - even look at chimpanzees our closest cousins. Power law distributions of wealth come from economics, and laws are there to enforce our human understanding of fairness against our human nature of selfishness and greed.

Violence and waging war is/was commonly considered an honorable deed by many tribal cultures.

Pathological inequality is not.

>laws are there to enforce our human understanding of fairness against our human nature of selfishness and greed.

The fallacy of this statement is that laws are just words in paper which have no power to enforce itself.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Violence and war are unequal - the strong (and male) take from the weak the old the young and the nursing. Laws are a compact between the strong and the rest, that with defence from the strong we will get peace and sharing and status. Status is the coinage society bribes the strong to prevent them just taking all they want. At some point society manages to produce through peace and trade more than could be stolen and the deal becomes profitable for both sides.

And different guards guard each other. Balance of power etc

The simple use of the term "IP" goes against your goal. All these things we call "IP" are mostly unrelated to the notion of "property" itself ; they're related to temporary government-enforced monopolies.

This simplistic view as a "property", which is a very familiar notion for most of us, confuses people into thinking that they could, and should be able to "own", for example, a joke, an idea for a business, or any kind of idea, the same way they can today own their car or their house.

The law is way more complicated than that, and by default, ideas can't be owned (and for that matter, can't be "stolen" either). I don't think we want this to change. However, it might be desirable to get this into peoples' mind.

> The simple use of the term "IP" goes against your goal. All these things we call "IP" are mostly unrelated to the notion of "property" itself ; they're related to temporary government-enforced monopolies.

It also lumps together many unrelated things. There is no big trouble with trademarks. Copyright itself isn't even a problem, the problem there is DRM. But software patents are unredeemable. They aren't all the same.

There's also a bunch of other mostly unrelated stuff that gets called intellectual property, such as regional designations (e.g. "designed in California") and ship hull designs, which receive their own special treatment:

https://www.quora.com/Why-were-boat-hull-designs-specificall...

Each of these "intellectual properties" has its own special nuances and treatments, and often completely different laws. You have to demonstrate originality to copyright something, but you can trademark the most unoriginal things. You have to demonstrate that something has a function before you can patent it, but you can copyright the most useless things. You need to demonstrate that something really was created where you want to regionally designate it, but you don't need to prove anything to trademark it.

Lumping them all together is like saying programming, literature, mathematics, and theatre are all the same just because they all happen to have some sort of abstraction to them.

Dude! programming, literature, mathematics and theatre are all "text stuff"!

> All these things we call "IP" are mostly unrelated to the notion of "property" itself ; they're related to temporary government-enforced monopolies.

All "property" is government enforced monopolies, and much of it outside of IP (and especially much of the broader class of intangible personal property of which IP is itself as subclass) is also either temporary or conditional in nature.

The difference is, a property right to a single parcel of land doesn't give you market power. You don't own every similar parcel of land. It isn't a monopoly in the antitrust sense. But a patent on a device does exactly that.

> The difference is, a property right to a single parcel of land doesn't give you market power.

Depends on the features of the parcel and the nature of the market for use of it.

> Depends on the features of the parcel and the nature of the market for use of it.

And in the patent case it doesn't.

Of course it does. The claims define what a patent covers. Noting that the vast majority (95%+?) of patents go unused, it's reasonable to assume that they have some correlation with market usage. What other hypothesis would you posit for the over abundance of value-less patents? Mine is that most ideas have no market value terrible, hence most patents don't either.

> The claims define what a patent covers.

And then it covers all of them. The whole market. It's like if you owned a ranch house on a beach and that caused you to become the owner of every ranch house on every beach, and if someone built a new one somewhere else on some land that isn't yours then you would become the owner of it too. That's not how real property works.

And you're confusing the value of the market with control over it. It's possible to have a total monopoly on some useless junk nobody wants.

In the antitrust sense, the standard set upthread, market power requires pricing power, which inn turn requires that there is both some market demand and inefficient competition from market substitutes (which need not be identical) to constrain the monopolists ability to set prices and extract rents.

Pricing power doesn't actually require demand, it's just that nobody cares about the markets where there is no demand. But it's still a monopoly, which you would notice immediately if any demand ever came to exist, the hope for which is why people even bother applying for those patents.

Without demand, the test for pricing power (the ability to raise prices from some level at which there are nonzero sales without losing sales) cannot be satisfied -- you can't have market power with no market.

> Without demand, the test for pricing power (the ability to raise prices from some level at which there are nonzero sales without losing sales) cannot be satisfied -- you can't have market power with no market.

In theory that's the test, but it doesn't actually work. In practice market power isn't binary. There is always a substitute for anything if you jack the price up high enough. And a monopolist would jack the price right up to that point, so that increasing it any more would cost sales.

But the zero volume case is the divide by zero case anyway. A test isn't going to give you a yes or no, it's going to give you NaN. That doesn't mean there is no market power, it only means you can't tell without a buyer. And in the patent case, as soon as there is a buyer there is market power.

Sure it does; there's no pricing (and therefore market) power if the mechanism, however novel and eligible for protection, has alternatives with equal utility.

> Sure it does; there's no pricing (and therefore market) power if the mechanism, however novel and eligible for protection, has alternatives with equal utility.

That's kind of the point. A patent by its nature has zero value without market power.

Contrast this with actual property. If you have wheat or copper, you have no market power, it's a pure commodity market, but people will still pay you something for it.

Consumers are like water seeking the path of least resistance. It takes lots of engineers to reduce the resistance. Someone pays these engineers. That money comes from the users. Users don't like to actually pay for things if there is a free alternative, so users pay indirectly with their information.

A Facebook clone wouldn't pull many users due to network effects. I think decentralization is opposed to network effects in this case.

The article mentions the somewhat current but certainly future problem of decisions being made by algorithms which "casually crush" users without any human being able to determine why it happened (and in many cases unable to fix it).

They could fix this problem by hiring more people and giving them more power to correct the system, but it will probably never be a big enough problem to affect the bottom line.

Increasing awareness of the problem and technical skill among users would probably cause users to become more autonomous and less like water. This is a long term possibility, but it strikes me as an unappealing fight. It’s like trying to convince an entire generation to take bitter medicine without any parents to assist. I’ll assume users won’t be getting better. Perhaps we just need to focus on building better ways to protect ourselves from the almighty algorithm, so there are options when the system fails. We can protect our data from online shopping sites by having nodes that process purchases for a large number of users and perhaps ship to a network of local points where pickup is by some type of PKI based system. Social networks seem like a lost cause. A return to blogs with lots of links rather than a replacement network may be the answer.

But, it is possible to make distributed systems that are interopable. In that case, the standard, not a system itself is what gains the network effect.

The open source social crowd does not get this at all. Federated social networks exist, and their user-facing sides suck.

Here's the home page for joining Diaspora.[1]

Here's the home page for joining Urbit.[2]

Here's the home page for joining GNU Social.[3]

Any questions?

[1] https://joindiaspora.com/ [2] http://urbit.org/ [3] https://gnu.io/social/

Ha! I can assure you that by the time Urbit is ready to compete with Facebook, it'll be as easy to sign up for as Facebook. That's a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. It ain't happening any time soon, neither.

Metcalfe's law is an impossible problem in theory, but not necessarily in practice.

For instance, one way for a new system to get around Metcalfe's law is to steal the network effect of the existing network. This is the same principle as in Tantek Celik's POSSE (publish on self, syndicate elsewhere) design, but a little more general.

Concretely, it's very hard to compete with Facebook, but relatively easy to let a user control their own Facebook account from their own general-purpose computer. Especially if you can get them to bring their own API key ("BYOK").

From controlling your own data in Facebook, you may move to mirroring it; from one-way mirroring, to two-way sync; from two-way sync, to discarding the silo. So it's not even necessary to replace Facebook in one impossible step; you can build a stepladder for users to migrate off gradually.

Of course, that this is possible doesn't make it easy!

>Free software won. Yay!

Sorry, but it didn't. Not the way we wanted it to, back in 1999.

It just won companies who use it on their servers or as a lower level component of their value added offerings (from Android phones and iOS -Mach, BSD etc-, to set top boxes).

And the main things those companies care for is that it's free (as in beer) and free (as in "lots of volunteers help improve their software they then wrap and sell as part of their commercial products for free").

But FOOS didn't won the consumers and end users -- those could not care less whether their Android device is based on FOSS Linux or not.

Besides, it's mostly closed/proprietary mobile apps they buy and use on it day in, day out. Plus closed (silo-ed) web services.