dalbasal

I think managing antitrust cases is a core competency for Google. They've learned that antitrust isn't scary. The worst that might happen is a fine or a court ordered policy-change.

The fines are the minor cost associated with monopolistic business practices. In this case, the practice is Google's profitable and strategic SE-OEM deals in this case. Those have been litigated before, and win or lose, it is trivially better to continue the practices and just deal with the heat when it comes.

Perhaps, but that's not the point.

The point is that you can't have this software, because the monopolies in this space have formed a trust to prevent it from being an option.

Ad I said, I'm skeptical of the more expansive of such expectations. They might just sit on the debt, almost certainly if it's valued below a certain sum.

The chains of effect leading to a useful improvement in lending prudence... long. The opportunities to stray some other way, many. Graveyards are full of wonks that expect a minor policy tweak to fix a problem, rather than just move it around.

Most of these debts are unpaid bills, car payments, etc. Not businesses that specialise in debt. They outsource that part, and that part outsources too. "More prudent" means credit rating standards, or (usually) higher interest rate. That's not doing anything useful, IMO. You still get left with as much or more defaults, lawless collection, etc.

IMO, if when we want to actually deal with something, we drop the grand ideas and operate at the level of the issue we want to affect. Where there are multiple "orders," we want to tightly control the "chain."

Lawlessness in debt collection? Law enforcement. IP trolls abusing the legal system. Make it illegal.

Look... Google, FB and such had IP laws specially tailored to them. Timed and written to shield them from legitimate copyright infringement claims, taking into account their ability to "implement IP" without interfering with their business too much. Where is the law for the person in OP's shoes? It doesn't exist. He has to suffice with the print paradigm that existed before www.

Not-incidentally, the "print paradigm" was tailored for newspapers. That's what fair use is. It's not some abstract concept that happened to work for news. It was designed for them, probably by them. Copyright just isn't designed to work for ordinary people, so once you have incidents like this posts'... the realistic thing to do is avoid being a copyright user at all.

If you want a clever law expected to make debt valued <X% impossible to profitably collect, make it dumb. You probably need an institution of some sort to control that second order, or a willingness to make blanket laws that harm other participants that aren't your target. Consider the RL structure of consumer lending, not a chalkboard model.

Disney, Google, or the think tanks they fund to develop laws... they're certainly looking for a tightly controlled cause-effect chain with built in guarantees.

Maybe. I mean, it might makes moral sense maybe. IRL, these things play out in unsatisfying ways.

"that would make many loans more difficult to issue"

Maybe in some cases, but I'm broadly skeptical. Selling bad debt is usually not an important part of non-shady businesses models. 2nd order effects, if any, are likely to be the main concern. If a business is known to offer 10% settlements after 2 years... that predictability will eventually be taken advantage of.

Honestly, I think the debt stuff (also aspects of copyright) are just the loose ends of major industries. Most bad debt or long tail IP assets aren't worth much. But if you can bundle, they're never too small to monetize.

Once you have an industry dedicated to squeezing that last drop... you probably have a destructive industry.

IMO, the best solutions is policing. Somehow, policing is rarely mentioned as a solution to corporate crime. That might mean occasionally tweaking laws to help make policing effective... but that only makes sense ifyou are already policing.

I bet these trolls are as sloppy as the victims they're targeting. At least in debt collection, at a certain depth... they're not doing any due diligence. Often, all they have is a name, number and sum. That means they often are collecting on BS premises. Charge them with fraud, or racketeering. A business practice premised on demanding payment of a debt, without proof that the debt is real... that's an extortion racket.

I wonder if the trolls here can stand up to scrutiny. Do they actually own the rights? Have they based their business model on strategic avoidance of due diligence? From what I've heard, IP trolling exists by exploiting liability limits of both corporate law, and practical law enforcement.

Precisely. Culture is very adaptive to adaptive stimulus, and stimulus is high... very high.

I think legal/contractual/economic structure is going to determine things, not human preferences. Preferences evolve.

Maybe, but "photographers" aren't really a collective... or too loose a collective to have foresight, interests and such.

The credit industry, traditionally, has a cascade of debt collection tiers. Once one tier fails to collect, they'll sell on the debt. The value of the debt (asset, to the collector) decreases drastically as we travel down the tiers. The "quality" of collectors also decreases. Business models that depend on illegal practices, betting on inadequate enforcement. Trial preparations that depend on 99% certainty of defendant not showing up. Most of the debt might be arbitrarily imposed interest and fines to nonresponsive "clients." The lawyer present may not have paperwork, or even know the companies' originally owed.

Financial assets like bad debt portfolios scale and bundle wonderfully, so there's no floor. There are multi-million dollar packages out there selling for $1000. An enterprising individual might take a blind chance. Apply creative means of collecting 1.3% of total debt. Maybe you offer 90% settlements. Maybe impose 500% fees and sell on. Maybe you specialise in deceased estates, acquire high morbidity debtor lists, and use systemic timing to advantge. Maybe you rebunde such that specialists can have a crack.

Anyway... At the copyright trolling end of this game, I'd make a distinction between "photographers," "rights holders" and the "copyright biz." What some shady lawtech startup does to monetize a copyright portfolio owned by their pay-per-performance client... "Photographer" is not really an active category within this structure.

Profit is an accounting term, so ambiguous. To be actually clear, it would be useful to qualify it as "taxable profit" or "investor profit," for example. In practice, these are two unrelated numbers for most big companies. Each one is defined by who you are communicating to, and what the rules are for this communication.

You might also have "management profit," a catch-all term for unstandard & unregulated metrics. For example, A business graduates from "cash accounting" for tax and investor purposes... but it's still useful for the old management to track the old definition of profit. Maybe because habits. Maybe because it tracks cash flow or is useful some other way.

It's one of those pomo problems. The SEC, IRS or bank manager will not stand for "SEC Profit." They want "real" profit. It's like a naive local politician demanding to know what the hospital "really" cost the contractor.

Anyway.... like the SEC, IRS and such... author is using terms from their own perspective. When they say "Open Source does not win by being cheaper," "open source" specifically refers to an open source business modeled after MongoDB or similar. So yes, investors, growth goals and such are implied.

He clarifies himself on this point and there's no real point taking it into semantic growling.

Podcasting, like wikipedia, Linux, WWW and a few other relatively "free" objects are such an important counterexamples. There's so much to learn from all of them, like theoretical devices come to life.

The inability of big services (EG, google, apple) to monopolize or gatekeep podcasting relates directly to their failure to make money.(1) the protocol's minimal snooping options relates to the failure to implement digital adtech... and to the lack of good discovery/recommendation services. The unique freedom capabilities podcasting seems to have. The barriers(2) to entry... all so interlocked.

Spotify's big money attempt to make money off podcasting is/was all about buying exclusivity. Paying big podcasters (eg rogan) to remove their podcast from other players... podcasts spotify already had free access to. Not shocking or surprising, but instructive. They very big money... more than anyone would likely invest on podcasting proper.

The market panic when netflix realised it was in a competitive market with price pressure from both consumers and producers because competition. How are you supposed to have 50% profit margins like that! Google would rather walk away from a market than concede anything short of full price setter mode on either end.

There's this point where Peter Thiel and Karl Marx are finishing each other's sentences and drinking Rum. I'm starting to think that point is a certain type of prevailing market condition. The rest is derivative.

"Google says it plans on further increasing its investment in the podcast experience on YouTube Music and making it more of a destination for podcast fans with features focused on discovery, community, and switching between audio podcasts and video. The latter is something rival Spotify has also"

Anyone remember the "HD video race?" Online video was obviously a big thing. Bandwidth & quality were big problems receding as fast as broadband expanded. Google had an in-house video hosting service. They bought youtube. Other services still existed. Google effin plowed forward. They smoked everyone with their ability to implement HD streaming at massive scale. No one could keep up.

Now Google's PR statements refer to breakthrough features like "backgrounding video" as a multi-year effort to reach feature parity with spotify. oy.

Google can successfully do many things. The are capable of making excellent products. I think they're also capable of making many more economically viable products. However... the enormous profit margins they enjoy make anything short of monopoly pointless.

(1)Google literally sell ads on those same podcasts via youtube. (2) At some point, "barrier to entry" goes negative. Early blogging tech lowered barriers to entry. Referring to modern social media's "barriers" feels like discussing the "challenge" of eating caramel popcorn dusted with coke.

I don't think this is a problem.

A piece like this is not a self contained textbook. It's a hot topic with 100 years of history near the centre of political and economic discourse. Contentious claims are inevitable.

The reverse claim also gets made, and whether or not the claim is "supported," it's never sufficiently supported. The reality is that there's a whole debate with vountermoves behind either claim.

One side looks at employment, tonnage, plant construction, anecdote and common sense. The other looks at accounting.

Accounting says that "manufacturing" has increased. Skeptics consider this an accounting fiction. The reality is that "manufacturing" in 2023 is not quantifiable in the way that it was in 1923. Accounting semantics are abstract and past a point turn into a matter of accountants' naming convention.

A 1923 ford factory represented most of the "manufacturing" represented by the cars that they produced. As the industry splits into OEMs, T1s, T2s, toolers and whatnot^ we move into more abstract definitions. Has one of Ford's industrial engineering teams ceased to be "manufacturing," because they now design processes for a Mexican subsidiary? How about the US-based management/overherheads for the subsidiary? Irl, accountants can represent these any way that the tax man, board or market prefers. The same physical change can represent 20% or 5% decrease in manufacturing.

There's just a point where quantifications fail, and can't be used to decide such debates conclusively.

Where we're at now, imo, requires us to keep purpose in mind, and forget about a single, neutral quantification. If you're quantifying manufacturing for maximum military potential, employment or resilience to trade problems... You probably need different definitions/quantifications of "manufacturing."

^These specific conventions were created to structure trade deals and regulate tarrifs.

>>The Department of Defense’s (DoD) mission has traditionally been one of military security rather than economic security and assuring a strong American industrial base. Yet economic security and military security are now inseparable.

I think a big, poorly understood part of these stories is "advanced games" or "long term degeneration."

Take government procurement, like fighter jets or new hospitals. Post-war, the way this worked was "cost-plus." Companies accounted for their costs and were promised a fixed profit. The obvious flaw is that companies lose interest in efficiency. But... it did work during the war and resulted in more tanks, ships and jets than anyone thought possible. It also worked post war.

But, such games mature. Under "cost-plus" a company increases profits by spending. That's an incentive that will bite eventually. So... they move to competitive bidding. This degenerates into a lawyers-only game, etc.

That's the administrative layer, but game maturation also exists at the political layer. Rooseveltism was a thing for a while, and then anti-rooseveltism became it's competition. During the neoliberal era, industrial policy was the devil. Half the international institutions (trade deals, imf, wb) exist mostly to enforce bans and limits on industrial policy.

During this era, when governments' job was to "get out of the way," the alternative to (now evil) industrial policy was either big trade deals, or tax policies. Tax breaks and tax complexity counted as "getting out of the way" while trade deals structured markets (eg auto-manufacturing) with more detailed rules than a Soviet five year plan.

Anyway.... the statement about making economics a defence job... it feels like an attempt to declare bankruptcy on the "trade-deals and tax breaks" era, and move to an weirder and more awkward model. A bad idea that hasn't played out might be better than a better one that has.

In the feisty spirit of this article: Balderdash!

The basis for this articles' argument^ is not really empirical. It's theoretical. And rational in the sense that it models theory to create predictions... It is quite a cherry-picked collection of published studies, not a metastudy.

Anyway, the crux of theoretical argument is "supply and demand... duh." This is often true, depending on the market, but... it really depends on the market. For real estate, "focusing on supply" often leads to understating the significant "out of theory" factors.

For example, real estate "demand," is largely determined by mortgage availability. That's the source of funds. Besides this, British real estate is an investment class with prices affected by rates, performance of other asset classes, and such. These are big factors.

Dublin city, not far, basically conducted an unscripted experiment in this space during 2008-2015. Lending collapsed. Demand collapsed. Lending was gradually restored, and median house values tracked median approved mortgage max outs. IE, if the average bank agreed to lend $X to the average applicant with an average income... that became the average price. Where the banks (CB, really) created subcategories with special rules (eg single bedroom apartments were mortgage disqualified for a while), those special rules dictated average prices for those categories.^^

This is not surprising when you consider the various leverages and flexibilities of the demand side, compared to the flaccid supply side of the equation.

"When asked about the impact of a 10 per cent increase in regional housing supply, however, 40 per cent say prices and rents would rise, while only a third say they would fall."

Sounds to me that most people just guess. But... this is a disingenuous frame. A 10% increase in (London) housing supply doesn't happen often. That's the point. When it does happen, it rarely happens unless prices hold up. There is no realistic scenario where London is exploding into the sky while a flood of supply crashes prices. This is tunnel-vision, model-only thinking. The supply "lever" he wants to crank is good for fractions of a percent, not 10%.

None of this is to say not to build. If we don't build housing, we cant have more housing. But, house prices are not made in the the council's planning permission basement. This is fantasy.

^"Studies show" is a cop out. Make the argument yourself. Base your arguments on the studies, if convincing. Shots fired :-)

^^In Ireland, this has led to the opposite extreme, and equally erroneous belief that supply is always irrelevant to price.

I know we're supposed to be jaded by our past defeats, licking our wounds and cringing at the echoes of naive digital ideas we once thought had legs... I know that he's tricking me into liking him by writing well, with conviction and to the point. I know that it's hopeless now. That the empire has won. I do know these things, but... it's hard for me not to have hope.

Is it really possible that modern culture will all just be owned in one or three portfolios.

> a small group of folks that are at least as competent as the folks at WhatsApp pre-acquistion

That's a success case... beware survivorship bias.

> if there are lots of bozos in the startup

No arguing that quality engineers are fundamental to quality engineering. That said... by this standard, there's no point in having this entire discussion. Every good db/store out there is good. They all work very well if used as they should be, with due respect to tradeoffs. Yet, almost everyone has db problems. Almost every one of these problems occur well within the technical limits of postgres or whatnot.

"It shouldn't be a problem" when it usually is irl is tunnel vision. There is an empirical reality disagreeing with you. Walking into it with "this shouldn't be a problem unless everyone is a moron" is bad strategy. If you can't think of reasons why architecture can and will become a problem, then just assume that you (or some of you, some of the time) are morons, and try to make it moron proof.

A brain, a manual and google is usually a pretty good way generally to make solid decisions, respect the limits of your chosen stack.

What happens when there is >1 brain involved... or when brainless, manualless decisions eventually get made... or two pivots from now...

I'm not disagreeing with your approach. I agree with it, especially as starting point. I'm cautioning that resilience against complexity isn't about how easy it is to make good decisions when you understand the spec, read the manual and calmly proceed. Complexity and fragility accumulate when one or all of these are absent. How easily you can (and thus inevitably will) make a mess... not how easily you can keep it clean.

IRL situations with regular rdbs, a very common trend seems to be long term drift between schema and spec. The flexibility and approachability of postgres often enables a lot of kludge eventually.

Data stores have this dichotomy between "look how easy" and "is limiting factor" that speaks to difficulties we don't know how to articulate or isolate.

The problem with these discussions is that you can always get a lot out of any given architecture, structure, db approach or whatnot. Can. There's just a lot of daylight between "can" and "likely will."

Ultimately, everything has its limitations and tradeoffs. If we respect them, it's generally a smooth ride. Problem is that we rarely do... within a company (startup or otherwise) under real conditions. There's also a dynamic where we build until the point where something stops us. Tech debt, complexity, over-engineering, under-engineering, feature bloat or antagonism between early decisions and current goals.

There's a self-regulating aspect to this. If architecture is spot on, perfect for the task at hand we can move faster to reach the point where it no longer is.

you're right. culture doesn't exist, I suppose.

This is pointless semantics, like the perpetual insistence on correcting "monopoly" to "oligopsony" or whenever monopoly is discussed.

No one knows the word "dower," and the term "dowry" is used pretty widely to describe the entire mess of different customs that do and did exist. IRL, these are all symbolically complex and play a role that is usually different to the symbolic one.

Engagement rings are a riff on these.

Or any other winter festival that was practiced before christmas, and christianity superseded it.

> No longer purchasing women from fathers is a strict improvement over the allegedly pristine culture of the past.

Blah. This is pious view, and a pious dismissal... not a thought out or real feminist perspective... imho.

The past (and present) is complicated... and patriarchal. Marriage, dowries, other symbols, customs and language around marriage... they all relate pretty directly to patriarchy because marriage was (and often still is) patriarchal.

Intertwined within that web were all sorts of dowry customs. Money can go either way, be symbolic or actual. It can explicitly represent a prospective divorce settlement... etc.

Diamond engagement rings happen to have very little to do with either patriarchy or liberty. They're just common consumer culture in a void that once housed real cultural content, whether those were patriarchal or otherwise.

Or how about a proper dowry... that is the point.

A savings bond, or even a symbolic gold chain... provided that the price is reasonably represented in gold weight.

Dowries are/were a symbolic and real proof of financial fortitude, intent. They often a represent real safety net. In some cases, increase the woman (or man's) ability to leave a marriage, a liberty and power balance function.

So much of our modern culture is a corrupt cargo cult. We are completely removed from the meaning behind our symbolisms, both intellectually and culturally.

China's adoption of Christmas and Christmas-like festivities for retail purposes is my favourite example. A copy of a copy with all meaning distilled to "winter shopping."

Anyway... there's no inherent reason for engagement rings, gifts or donations. If we like the traditional/cultural aspects... use them. Otherwise, why so sheep?

The AOL story is foundational, IMO, to gain an understanding of the business.

To me, the most instructive part is the open web's triumphalism at defeating AOL.

AOL thought they could own the internet by controlling the front door... portal strategy, in the terms of the times. They expected to brute force their way to scale with expensive marketing campaigns. etc

Once the www "won," everyone knew how foolish AOL was. Information wanted to be free. Open protocols will run circles around a closed kludge. etc.

It's very 90s. A sort of peak modernism. Openness wasn't just desirable and effective... it was also inevitable. Maybe we needed to watch for network neutrality, but otherwise things would look after themselves.

Freedom isn't just better. It's so much more effective, more popular and powerful than short sighted alternatives that it is inevitable. This optimism was so powerful, we got completely blindsided a few years later.

In retrospect, AOL's strategic vision was prophetic. Their flaw was not pushing it hard enough, not having enough belief, giving up too early. Maybe they couldn't own everything, but they could have owned a lot. Even if they had just held onto the lest sophisticated users, chatrooms and news they would have been a goog/fb/amzn.

>> Repeating the negative generalisations over and over can contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Very true, but it's also treacherous to go blindly in the opposite direction. We need to be capable of both modes of thought... even if they contradict occasionally.

Interoperability definitely has the potential to "save." It's very good to have someone focus in on that with optimism and conviction. OTOH, we also need to remember that there are (or at least may be) other factors at play.

At this point, "freeing the web" likely entails bankrupting FB and Google. Their ad businesses just do not work without dominant market share, control over user data and such. See Twitter, Bing, reddit, etc. They don't have pro rata earnings relative to the big boys.

Can Google and Facebook fail, without causing disaster, political mitigation efforts, recession, etc? I'm not saying this to contradict the arguments, just pondering the scale of the task at hand.

I think a usable middle road might be to focus on interoperability's direct, first order achievables... not the big picture. What, in the most practical and down to earth terms, can be achieved by and achievable step in the interoperability direction.

I think "The Problem with Agile," especially at this point, is mostly upstream of any implementation details.

What kind of an organisation is going to adopt a packaged management method like that? Cargo cult adoption of practices, language, job titles, consultants, tools and formal certifications... The company that invented agile would never have "gone agile" in 2023.

I'm not saying that agile can't work. I'm saying that an insurance company "adopting agile" is an insurance company buying a trendy management method for their engineers. It matters not if the method is called agile or a 1972 booklet from the USSR. Practices, practiced blindly are rituals.

A lot of coding work, and modern work generally is all learning. IE, a lot of tasks consist mostly of learning to complete the task. There's just a lot of cascade. The language, library, codebase, prerequisites specific to the task, etc.

Often you spend half the day learning about the task, then learn or refresh some bit of required technique or knowledge... then you just do it.

In carpentry, engine restoration, cooking or whatnot... this is typical of early days. Every early carpentry project requires some learning. A new cut, a join or glueing method. As you mature in the discipline, the density of novelty and learning decreases.

"Learning" is a bit of a catch all. Learning about the product, library or API might just be literal information gathering. Other "learning" might be skill building, requiring practice and repetition to "learn." EG, brushing up on regex to deal with some misbehaving code.

In any case, we tend to be pretty resistant to openly practicing, or training ourselves. We prefer to err on the "knowledge gathering" side. Or... we do agree to practice, but adopt a low effort "just practice" mentality that isn't effective. Layer these tendencies onto modern work, where the divide between learning and doing is unintuitive and vague... most of us are not practicing enough to do what we want to do.

"Just build" is, IMO, mostly a hack to make us practice with sufficient effort and persistence for learning to happen. If you have a thing you want to build, you need to practice building it. The proficiency you acquire is often more useful and valuable (even for the task itself) then the concrete output... until a much later stage in the game than we intuit.

Museum, often, are 90% warehouse.

The idea that museums should have exhibitions and be open to the public was a later development.

Think of all the consumer action efforts, and (especially) talk on one hand. Think of the successes on the other... basically none but a few minor symbolic wins.

Sure. Hiphop also still exists.

However, both genres have origin stories that's deeply intertwined with copyright litigation, enforcement and their development.

I like timelines and other formalisations as of thinking/discussing about digital freedom... and I agree that this is a key freedom battleground in the coming decades (maybe centuries).

Alongside this, I think it's worth keeping in mind gradual changes without discreet dates.

For example, online copyright enforcement/existence has been on a complex, but directional journey over the 20 years. Same for "safety" and other "content policies," both euphemistic and literal. For a short time copyright looseness made "mashups" a major musical genre. Years later, walking by a speaker playing music triggers automatic "demonetisation" on youtube. Meanwhile, social media became much more centralised and inoffensive. Nudity, politics and such are strongly discouraged unless explicitly encouraged.

There are landmarks in the China-touching part of this timeline that are critical to understanding where we are. At one point, the great firewall was derided. Violating digital freedom with comprehensive censorship meant opting out the digital revolution.

Google "walked away" from China when they got too insistent about "getting the message" and independently censoring search in line with unwritten, but well understood censorship rules. Google regretted this and their subsequents did not repeat the error. Since then, most major tech companies have learned the lesson. Telsa, Apple, Disney, Microsoft, etc.

In June 2021, a bug on Bing accidentally applied a chinese censorship setting worldwide. "Tank Man" no longer existed on Bing. A demonstration of what flipping a switch in local content settings can do.

Twitter's quite easy to stop consuming... Easier than Google, Amazon, etc.

It doesn't matter though. It's not just a matter of lock in. There are other reasons.

For one thing, data isn't really data in private chunks. It's only valuable collected.

"Consumer action," whether organized or individual has 0% chance of affecting what happens next here. It's all down to ip law and it's adjacents. No real reason to expect intentional actions here.