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Comment by wqaatwt | Hacker News Reader

> A new system vendor needs to be created

If it’s not created and grown organically (with some extra funding and indirect support) it will certainly and inevitably suck.

Government bureaucracies can’t directly establish and build a tech company. They will end up replicating their structure and decision making processes which will lead to massive inefficiency and result in crappy product with poor UX that are not built for actual users.

Also free market competition always was and is the main source of human progress. If EU can establish an environment where competition can thrive something might happen. If they create a government owned monopoly and everyone is forced to use the same vendor who has zero incentive to build non crappy products, well.. the outcome won’t be good.

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> free market competition always was and is the main source of human progress

Not really though, most progress is driven by scientific or government institutions, offloaded only to private enterprise for execution, usually still heavily subsidized to cover risk.

True free market competition creates monopolies and stagnation, this is not a controversial opinion.

> most progress

Well most progress in computing, software and related areas did come from private companies.

> True free market competition creates monopolies and

That’s where regulation must come in. To stop monopolies from forming or at least from abusing their position.

Anyway your suggestion is to jump straight to the monopoly phase?

There is an uncomfortable truth to reconcile with in that the vast majority of technological progress in private companies has come from monopolistic ones.

True, yet those major tech companies are still incentivized to make good products to some extent if they want to remain monopolies longterm. Just look at Intel..

If you have the government forcing everyone to buy your products regardless of their quality you have no such incentives.

The Internet came from the military originally, the Web came from CERN, many advances in programming languages (like automatic garbage collection) came from academia, and so on. Your claim about where most progress came from isn't obviously true.

And to the extent that it might be true, to what extent is that just structural? In a society with a focus on free markets, more will come from free markets, naturally.

> Internet came from the military originally, the Web came from CERN,

That’s certainly true, yet 90-99% (exact percentage is debatable) of progress came from non government funded organizations.

> extent is that just structural

Generally human behavior is driven by competition. That applies to individuals (e.g. scientists) even if they work in the public sector. Large government organizations or monopolies have no such incentives.

> Also free market competition always was and is the main source of human progress.

Source: "100 things that never happened"

Or the majority of human history..

But of course it depends on how you define “free market competition” (markets are very rarely even close to being free without significant regulation). Entities which end up “winning” almost inevitably do their utmost to restrict any competition which leads to stagnation.

I dunno if that many Nobel prizes are being awarded to people working for private companies.

But yes, you're right, a government monopoly where there isn't a natural monopoly isn't a good plan. Funding a whole bunch of small projects might be quite a good plan, though. Sort of like angel investment.

I don’t know if that many Nobel prizes were rewarded to any anyone working on software or even computing in general.

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