A world in which companies are not allowed to selectively withhold proprietary data from some competitors, and form partnerships with others, is a world that suboptimally promotes innovation and economic growth.
Market fundamentalists are so used to advancing arguments like this without being challenged that they have become almost completely divorced from the scientific method entirely.
Maybe being forced to share this kind of proprietary data, in this specific type of circumstance, will actually promote a more diverse marketplace with higher innovation. Maybe it won't.
Either way you don't just get to assert it.
And given that the person you're responding to is stating something that most economists would agree with, I think the impetus is on you to tear it down with "the scientific method" if you think the prevailing wisdom is wrong.
TLDR: don't provide proof for flat-earthers.
> It's impossible to have a discussion about anything if some things are not taken as axiomatic.
You mean you personally find it impossible to have a discussion with someone who disagrees with you on the axioms of economics because it means you can't frame the argument in your own terms, which would be that there is no alternative to what you are espousing.
My only point was that you may have better success railing against the conventional wisdom by providing an actual argument that it's wrong, not by ranting and raving about the existence of prevailing wisdom itself, and demanding that everyone provide a detailed proof every time they reference it.
You should check out the works of Milton Friedman, you might find them interesting!
If you were in fact an economist yourself, perhaps you would have recognized market fundamentalism as a term with a specific meaning, often used by economists:
Think about how much data Amazon has about all the suppliers and products they've sold over the last twenty years. Should they be forced to hand it over to anyone who wants it just because of the fact that its size and exclusivity makes it very valuable?
What about the governments databases on everything under the sun? Should all of that be public?
Maybe the answer to the above questions is yes, I don't know, but I don't think it's axiomatic.
I think the issue I have is with the idea that Facebook is successful, and therefore can no longer prevent their competitors from blatantly taking advantage of them. But I'm not sure where to draw the line.
If Visa and Mastercard decided for whatever reason that they wanted to kill some small banking chain and not allow payments for them or their customers to go through their network, that would be bad. But I don't think that means that they have to let an upstart competitor credit card startup have access to the huge multi-billion-dollar network they've built up, does it? Even if they might extend that network to other entities that don't compete with them?
In nature, random mutation leads to greater genetic diversity and speciation. In some mathematical optimizations, introducing random noise can help avoid getting stuck in local maxima.
Maybe economic growth, but how is innovation promoted by limiting access?
It also has the same limitations: If there's no competitive advantage to having proprietary data, then what's the point of developing the tech and services to try and obtain it?
There wouldn't be any point, and it would be totally fine.