Comment by wsy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wsy | Hacker News Reader

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I think we have to agree to disagree. I assume that you are not living in the EU. Our experiences here with governmental regulation are not so bad. Companies are complaining, but consumers are not.

Making things a little more convenient for everybody is super-compelling if there is no downside. Freedom for humans is an extremely high value. However, companies are not humans, there is no inherent benefit in giving them as much freedom as possible. And I know economics well enough to confidently state that freedom for companies does not naturally cause well-being and freedom for humans.

And definitely: Every country regulated power outlets. Every country regulated landline phone connections. Every country regulated mobile phone transmission. EU even regulated mobile phone roaming prices. Now they are regulating chargers. And I hope they won't stop, but do everything to keep modern technology open. Industry loves to lock consumers into separate, proprietary, walled gardens. There is no viable strategy for individual consumers to escape. The only viable strategy to escape is by regulation.

No countries did not regulate mobile phone transmissions. The US licenses bandwidth to different companies but did not legislate the protocols. That’s why in the US you had things like push to talk and Sprints aborted 4G non LTE protocol. The market killed it - not the government.

As far as not being able to escape, before 2007-2010, everyone feared the Windows lock-in, technology and the market made that not as big of a fear. Before that it was IBM.

By the time the slow moving government finally made a decision about IBM’s mainframe monopoly that it started in the 60s - in the mid 80s - the market had made the case irrelevant.

As far as everyone liking the files of the EU - see Brexit.

Windows was lock-in in late 90s and early 2000s. That was not only a fear. EU forced Microsoft to open Windows during that time. And that was a good thing. I don't want to wait decades until that stuff is sorted out by obsolescence.

Where is the advantage in waiting for the market?

However, no one forces you to live in the EU. Even countries can exit it. Let us do our thing, and you can do your thing. The market will sort it out :-)

EU had no affect on the browser wars. How do you explain that Chrome took over in the US. Again, Google made a better browser while Microsoft was sleep at the wheel.

Microsoft is just as dominant with Office and desktop PCs as it was in the 90s. The web and then mobile just made the desktop less relevant.

Of course, everybody can interpret history as they like. The fine handed out by EU to Microsoft was of course also a deterrent against further similar attempts, and Microsoft afterwards changed their tactics not only in EU, but world-wide. Or did you not get the Windows browser choice menu in US?

No we not did not get the Browser choice in the US. That’s kind of the perfect control to show that government policy didn’t have any effect. Chrome took over in both markets.

Also it wasn’t the choice of browsers that made Windows less relevant. It was that everything moving to the web made Windows less relevant and that gave to the rise of the modern mobile platforms now that you could do everything on the web that most people cared about and then the app economy.

What do you really think had a bigger impact on even IE losing marketshare, browser choice or the most popular website destination - Google - giving prime advertising real estate to Chrome and Google bundling Chrome with third party apps left and right?

We also see from FB that the little fines that governments hand out don’t stop corporations from behaving in a way that the government doesn’t like.

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