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I do not like the idea of "public utilities." However, I also don't like the size of the current players. The market works best when anti-trust has power. I lo

I do not like the idea of "public utilities." However, I also don't like the size of the current players. The market works best when anti-trust has power. I love the products that some of these companies make. However, I believe that people should always have a realistic choice. The power should be with the individual. Because of the value of data & information today, I think that anti-trust should be applied horizontally in addition to its traditional vertical use cases. I get that horizontal integration reduces a lot of friction but at this point it feels like I have to pick a team.

quadrangle 9y ago
How about acknowledging that public-utilities are, in principle, a fine idea? In practice, public utilities and the messiness of democracy (especially at large scale) can lead to all sorts of potential corruption and inefficiencies (though not strictly necessarily). Choice is far from a value to prioritize in and of itself. It's a check on power that monopolies and oligopolies have. Choice may be important, but not for its own inherent value necessarily. When you say, "the power should be with the individual", taken to the extreme, that's an anti-organization view; anti-corporate, anti-government, anti-union, etc. and while there's solid philosophy around it, the fact is that coordination of individuals in the form of organized groups are so much more powerful than individuals. The individual right of association automatically leads to situations of power in the associated groups themselves. In other words, individual power is fundamentally unstable in social contexts. Tyranny of structurelessness etc. What we're really dealing with in our market today is a supply-side power imbalance. The supply side is all organized into companies and trade groups, and they have tons of power. The demand side is divided into individuals in many cases, and that in itself makes them dramatically less powerful. What we need is more demand side power in the balance. If there's any way to get that without totally overwhelming the important individual freedoms, it's worth doing. There's no way to get what the supply side offers at all if we broke the supply side all the way down to individuals and blocked them from even forming companies at all. And the only way to actually balance company power on the demand side is to have some associations / teams etc. so that the demand side is similarly organized. Sure, that brings up potential risks to individual autonomy, but we just have to constantly adapt to keep a balance.
SkyMarshal 9y ago
I didn't like the idea of public utilities either in my idealistically naive youth. Then later I realized that natural monopoly public utilities work amazingly well, so well in fact you almost don't even realize they're there anymore and take them completely for granted - sewer, water, electricity, garbage. All the complexity and effort of making them work is hidden from the end user, it's the ultimate UI/UX accomplishment. Then you look at what happens when the private sector gets a hold of them, be it Enron in energy or for-profit banks in the money management business (which is already a partial utility thanks to central banking), and it calls into question the libertarian dogma that everything should be privatized.
- zebrafish 9y ago
  My garbage is privatized and my ISP is as well (an advocate for net neutrality) and both of those work just as well as my utilities do. I don't think providing two examples is a sufficient counterpoint to rebuke free-market principles. Either way, are we calling Google, Facebook, & Amazon natural monopolies now?
  - SkyMarshal 9y ago
    I suspect that natural monopolies subject to securitization, market manipulation and bubble-nomics are the ones that should remain public, as there's strong incentive for private entities to mismanage them for short term profits. I'm not sure anyone's figured out how to do that with garbage and internet access yet, hopefully never. Fwiw I'm uncomfortable with the recent push for anti-trust enforcement against the Big 5. I was around for the OS and Browser wars and thus far none of them have been as deliberately abusive as Microsoft was, who in my opinion at the time soundly deserved the threat of being split up. Interestingly though, it led to a strong open source ecosystem of alternatives, and now Linux dominates most of the server world, which is probably a far better outcome than anything the anti-trust suit could have achieved. Similar outcomes may happen to the Big 5, like the emerging decentralized/federated social networks (Mastadon) and secure email like ProtonMail and Tutanota, and privacy-respecting search like DuckDuckGo. I think it's best to hold off on any kind of legal action a while longer until we can see what happens in that respect.

quadrangle 9y ago

How about acknowledging that public-utilities are, in principle, a fine idea? In practice, public utilities and the messiness of democracy (especially at large scale) can lead to all sorts of potential corruption and inefficiencies (though not strictly necessarily). Choice is far from a value to prioritize in and of itself. It's a check on power that monopolies and oligopolies have. Choice may be important, but not for its own inherent value necessarily. When you say, "the power should be with the individual", taken to the extreme, that's an anti-organization view; anti-corporate, anti-government, anti-union, etc. and while there's solid philosophy around it, the fact is that coordination of individuals in the form of organized groups are so much more powerful than individuals. The individual right of association automatically leads to situations of power in the associated groups themselves. In other words, individual power is fundamentally unstable in social contexts. Tyranny of structurelessness etc. What we're really dealing with in our market today is a supply-side power imbalance. The supply side is all organized into companies and trade groups, and they have tons of power. The demand side is divided into individuals in many cases, and that in itself makes them dramatically less powerful. What we need is more demand side power in the balance. If there's any way to get that without totally overwhelming the important individual freedoms, it's worth doing. There's no way to get what the supply side offers at all if we broke the supply side all the way down to individuals and blocked them from even forming companies at all. And the only way to actually balance company power on the demand side is to have some associations / teams etc. so that the demand side is similarly organized. Sure, that brings up potential risks to individual autonomy, but we just have to constantly adapt to keep a balance.

SkyMarshal 9y ago

I didn't like the idea of public utilities either in my idealistically naive youth. Then later I realized that natural monopoly public utilities work amazingly well, so well in fact you almost don't even realize they're there anymore and take them completely for granted - sewer, water, electricity, garbage. All the complexity and effort of making them work is hidden from the end user, it's the ultimate UI/UX accomplishment. Then you look at what happens when the private sector gets a hold of them, be it Enron in energy or for-profit banks in the money management business (which is already a partial utility thanks to central banking), and it calls into question the libertarian dogma that everything should be privatized.

zebrafish 9y ago
My garbage is privatized and my ISP is as well (an advocate for net neutrality) and both of those work just as well as my utilities do. I don't think providing two examples is a sufficient counterpoint to rebuke free-market principles. Either way, are we calling Google, Facebook, & Amazon natural monopolies now?
- SkyMarshal 9y ago
  I suspect that natural monopolies subject to securitization, market manipulation and bubble-nomics are the ones that should remain public, as there's strong incentive for private entities to mismanage them for short term profits. I'm not sure anyone's figured out how to do that with garbage and internet access yet, hopefully never. Fwiw I'm uncomfortable with the recent push for anti-trust enforcement against the Big 5. I was around for the OS and Browser wars and thus far none of them have been as deliberately abusive as Microsoft was, who in my opinion at the time soundly deserved the threat of being split up. Interestingly though, it led to a strong open source ecosystem of alternatives, and now Linux dominates most of the server world, which is probably a far better outcome than anything the anti-trust suit could have achieved. Similar outcomes may happen to the Big 5, like the emerging decentralized/federated social networks (Mastadon) and secure email like ProtonMail and Tutanota, and privacy-respecting search like DuckDuckGo. I think it's best to hold off on any kind of legal action a while longer until we can see what happens in that respect.