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Comment by addy34 | Hacker News Reader

>An estimated 10 billion barcodes are scanned globally, every day, according to GS1, the organisation that oversees UPC and QR code standards.

GS1 are the ultimate gate keeping monopoly. They provide numbers as a service.

Most retailers like Amazon require you to have a GS1-issued barcode number on your product, and so you need to pay GS1 annually for the right to use a particular number. You can see the pricing here:

https://www.gs1us.org/upcs-barcodes-prefixes/how-to-get-a-up...

That's $250 upfront and $50/year for the right to use 10 numbers. What a business.

They get away with it by being a (tax-exempt) non-profit.

According to ProPublica, the CEO of the US division (Robert Carpenter) earned US$3.3 million in 2022.

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/362...

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> GS1 are the ultimate gate keeping monopoly.

It is a gate that actually needs to be kept, though. Like domain names - which provides an example of how it might be done in a way that allows for competition to lower prices. Although there are of course differences. But dividing the number space across a few competing entities seems a simple solution that should work to some degree.

Don't get me wrong. As with ISO norms, I think it is worth having well funded institutions that ensure there is progress and reliability.

But that can lead to problematic situations like with norms where everybody is required to fulfill them by law, but you have to pay in the vicinity of a thousand eurdollars to get the current version, leading to the situation where private people who also would have to fulfill those norms cannot read them and the norm institute can issues minor corrections each year that are meaningless because it means you have to get the new version in your field.

The way I see it at least something like the ISO norms should be paid for by taxes and then made available for free — if you want to require people to uphold those norms.

Now that ISO-example might not be directly translatable to GS-1, after all having a little cost and friction added to the process could be a feature in that case, as it means people won't be as likely to squat on numbers for fun or because they forgot. The question there is only how easy/unbureaucratic it is to get/cancel the number and if the cost is reasonable for people entering the market. And then you have to think again if that model of financing is truly what gives us the best outcome.

It does, but the only real requirement is to prevent duplicates. It's not a limited resource like domains or IP4 addresses. There's no justification for the subscription model aside from "because we can". They used to give out numbers in perpetuity, but eventually realized there was a lot more money to be made.

Dividing blocks over multiple competing providers is a good suggestion.

Tbh I suspect part of the value is that it limits the amount of absolute junk filling the store. Requiring a unique ID for every product that costs some money is a very low bar for real products, but a high bar for AI generated slop tshirts that might not sell a single unit.

Interestingly, it doesn’t look like IKEA uses UPC barcodes at all and just has their own format and numbers. I guess since they only sell their products in their own stores, there is no need for it to be globally unique.

Does it though?

There's a lot of junk sold on Amazon and Aliexpress.

I've never seen actual junk that doesnt work from a fake brand with a legit UPC barcode, which seems to indicate it's an effective gate keeper, if people cared to look at it.

I wonder what happens if you stop paying? Do they reuse your number? That would kind make their service pointless if a number you get could have already been used in previous valid products.

UPC's do have a lifetime already, so it's not entirely outside of their model.

Large companies produce so many UPC's for short lived products, especially fashion apparel, that GS1's rule is that UPC's should not be reused for at least 3 years.

> It's not a limited resource like domains or IP4 addresses.

I'm curious why you say it's not a limited resource.

Although you could theoretically expand the length of UPC every couple years to keep growing, the reality is that all the systems communicating these numbers back and forth need to have a standard.

In addition, printed barcodes need to fit within the area they are designed to fit in, if they were regularly increasing in size it would impact various systems (e.g. conveyor systems scanners, item labels, etc.)

What I find fascinating is that they have a form to request single UPC barcode numbers. But that form is effectively putting an item in a shopping cart of an online store.

So they perfected the "numbers as a service" business model up to the point that your average Joe can now buy themselves their own UPC number for $30 with almost the same simplicity as buying a book on Amazon. Maybe they should literally start selling UPC numbers on Amazon next?

The Firefox CEOs earn something like 7M dollars per year while the browser is losing market share and in my opinion one bad decision is made after another (killing extensions, not signing extensions, claiming browser is safe but then updating via some strange mechanism, investments in random projects, not maintaining the core which is the browser).

So 2x more than CEO of the QR company.

Sure, but noone is forcing you to use Firefox. Getting a barcode from GS1 is mandatory if you want your product to exist in the modern retail world.

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