5 ms·

Maybe . . . It's not intellectual property that keeps internet companies at the top of the pile, for the most part, unless we are counting trade secrets and dom

Maybe . . . It's not intellectual property that keeps internet companies at the top of the pile, for the most part, unless we are counting trade secrets and domain names as intellectual property (and they are in a sense, but not the sense that requires a government to create an artificial market for them).

jacquesm 9y ago
There is a strong underlying point to this though, pretty much predicted by RMS and it so far seems to be going in that direction. The last revision of the GPL tried to address some of the IP related consequences but there is only so much that can be done from that angle. Large piles tend to get larger, that's the major issue.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  Except if it's Sears, RCA, IBM, Kodak, etc.
  - nerdponx 9y ago
    All of which were blatantly mismanaged. More importantly, it's not as though the collapse of these piles suddenly led to a redistribution of the wealth they amassed...
    - tankenmate 9y ago
      Agreed, the only way this has been achieved in the past has been taxes on corporations and high net worth individuals as well as anti-trust laws (which target both large companies and high net worth individuals). At this point you have to wonder how long this Gilded Age will last.
    - WalterBright 9y ago
      When the company declines, the "amassed wealth" evaporates, because the value of the company as a company disappears. There isn't any wealth to redistribute, and the holders of that wealth were diminished along with it.
    - WalterBright 9y ago
      > All of which were blatantly mismanaged It's easy to be a monday morning quarterback about management. Even so, no company is immune from blatant mismanagement. It's not a no-brainer to effectively manage a large corporation, not remotely. For an example, look at Apple in the 1990s. A series of CEOs were all unable to get the company moving again, until Jobs was asked to return. (And those CEOs were all experienced and well-educated businessmen.)
      - amigoingtodie 9y ago
        Experienced in selling soda.
        WalterBright 9y ago
        That would be Sculley, who was also tutored by Jobs in how to manage Apple. The other CEOs were from the tech business.
  - javajosh 9y ago
    They get larger until the next paradigm shift. But what if we reach an asymptote, and there is no paradigm shift to serve as the force of decay? Of course, such a thing is unprecedented so we won't realize it until it already happens. Personally, I think that point was reached in about 2007, and the internet itself has been carving up every interaction that can be usefully computer mediated by a handful of super-scale vendors.
  - mattnewton 9y ago
    Do you think Amazon, Facebook or Google won’t buy out their would-be destroyers, regulators willing? And I don’t see any signs of unwilling regulators lately.
    - b4lancesh33t 9y ago
      Yahoo didn't when they had the chance. I mean I'm sure they'd love to if they can but will they see it coming early enough?
    - felipeko 9y ago
      When Facebook was growing there was a fear on Google that Facebook would lead to Google's irrelevance. Google+ was a very clear response to that. Still, Google couldn't buy Facebook and couldn't kill it. Microsoft couldn't kill/buy Google, Walmart can't kill/buy Amazon. Microsoft and Walmart are still big, but not that powerful anymore. So while i think they can buy their would be destroyers, that is actually very hard, because they mostly only realize that too late, or are stopped by something else (Microsoft did buy shares of Facebook before Google).
      - sien 9y ago
        And IBM didn't get to buy MS. Where is Commodore now? DEC? SGI? Intergraph? From 1955 to 2016 only 12% of firms remain in the Fortune 500. It's not clear that this sort of churn isn't still happening: http://www.aei.org/publication/fortune-500-firms-1955-v-2016-only-12-remain-thanks-to-the-creative-destruction-that-fuels-economic-prosperity/ http://www.aei.org/publication/fortune-500-firms-1955-v-2016... However, it's also worth noting that no churn would take a long time to show up.
        WalterBright 9y ago
        > From 1955 to 2016 only 12% of firms remain in the Fortune 500. I used to have a chart which showed the top 10 corporations by market cap, decade by decade. You didn't have to go very far back before you didn't even recognize the company names. I'm old enough to remember all the fear IBM struck into the hearts of everyone in the computer biz in the 1980s, fear that seems so laughable now it's hard to even remember it. Same thing in the 1990s, but with Microsoft. Other companies that inspired fear and certainty they'd take over the world - HP, AT&T, RCA. RCA? Anybody even recall that RCA was the name of a company, and not just the plug ends on your stereo equipment? Anyone remember that old WKRP episode where they were making fun of the fear of "The Phone Company", i.e. AT&T? There's a good reason for the decline of large corporations - they get too bureaucratic and complicated to manage efficiently. They tend to accumulate too much entrenched interest in obsolete models and technology. I.e. the world passes them by.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    Yes, but patent portfolios are a sought after asset in liquidations or acquisitions of failing giants.
    - WalterBright 9y ago
      Patents expire.
  - jordanb 9y ago
    What you see with the collapse of these companies is more concentration of market power, not less.
    - WalterBright 9y ago
      Please explain this with Kodak.
      - jordanb 9y ago
        I know you're being coy picking the example from your list where the market leader wasn't simply forced out by an even bigger market leader. But in fact we have seen a lot of consolidation in the photographic industry. Back in the days of film everyone had to choose from a select few manufactures of chemical film. but people who created photography had a wide variety of equipment manufacturers to choose from, and those who did it professionally had a wide variety of sales channels into which to sell what they produced. Good photography was valuable and many thousands of people could support themselves as freelance photographers. Now we still have a decent set of SLR vendors. There's Nikon, Canon, Sony. Um, probably some Chinese manufacturers. The point and shoot market has been eclipsed by the camera phone, for which there are now exactly two platform providers. But the collapse in price of photographs also produced a collapse in value of photography. All those freelancers found their sales channels dry up. There wasn't Look or Life or Nat Geo or hundreds of other publishers who needed photographs and were willing to pay top dollar for excellent work. Instead photographers found themselves trying to sell the rights for pennies on a few photo agency platforms, or more likely surviving entirely on event work. The choke point at film manufacturing went away for sure, but we have a new choke point at the publishing and delivery end, and this choke point exerts vastly more control over the entire industry than the film duopoly ever did.
        WalterBright 9y ago
        I can take a photo, post it on reddit, and get instant worldwide distribution. So can anyone else. https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/ There's a long list of such platforms anyone can upload pictures to. Or they can make their own websites. Anyone can do this. Sorry, I don't see any "choke point".
  - coliveira 9y ago
    This is irrelevant when the problem we are considering is concentration of the market forces. Of course in this process many large firms will be swallowed by even larger companies. Market concentration doesn't guarantee that large companies will continue to exist, only that the remaining ones will own most everything.
    - maxxxxx 9y ago
      And the shareholders of the companies that swallow or replace older companies most likely will be the same to a large extent.
djrobstep 9y ago
All markets are "artificial". Intellectual property is no different to other forms of property in this regard. Both require a government to enforce the laws that create them.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  There are markets and exchanges in which enforcement is strictly by force. Not particularly vibrant markets, mind, but they do exist. There may be international or extranational markets outside any particular jurisdiction. A market is an exchange interface. There is a wide range of applicable governing models.
- dnautics 9y ago
  If someone scams me on Bitcoin, what government can I appeal to have the laws enforced on the transaction?
sitkack 9y ago
Not often addressed in the largest of internet companies is how little the pay for bandwidth and transit. Google literally pays ZERO for internet access in either direction since they bought so much fiber in late 90s early 2000s. This is how they can run search (both directions) and youtube.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

jacquesm 9y ago

There is a strong underlying point to this though, pretty much predicted by RMS and it so far seems to be going in that direction. The last revision of the GPL tried to address some of the IP related consequences but there is only so much that can be done from that angle. Large piles tend to get larger, that's the major issue.

WalterBright 9y ago
Except if it's Sears, RCA, IBM, Kodak, etc.
- nerdponx 9y ago
  All of which were blatantly mismanaged. More importantly, it's not as though the collapse of these piles suddenly led to a redistribution of the wealth they amassed...
  - tankenmate 9y ago
    Agreed, the only way this has been achieved in the past has been taxes on corporations and high net worth individuals as well as anti-trust laws (which target both large companies and high net worth individuals). At this point you have to wonder how long this Gilded Age will last.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    When the company declines, the "amassed wealth" evaporates, because the value of the company as a company disappears. There isn't any wealth to redistribute, and the holders of that wealth were diminished along with it.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    > All of which were blatantly mismanaged It's easy to be a monday morning quarterback about management. Even so, no company is immune from blatant mismanagement. It's not a no-brainer to effectively manage a large corporation, not remotely. For an example, look at Apple in the 1990s. A series of CEOs were all unable to get the company moving again, until Jobs was asked to return. (And those CEOs were all experienced and well-educated businessmen.)
    - amigoingtodie 9y ago
      Experienced in selling soda.
      - WalterBright 9y ago
        That would be Sculley, who was also tutored by Jobs in how to manage Apple. The other CEOs were from the tech business.
- javajosh 9y ago
  They get larger until the next paradigm shift. But what if we reach an asymptote, and there is no paradigm shift to serve as the force of decay? Of course, such a thing is unprecedented so we won't realize it until it already happens. Personally, I think that point was reached in about 2007, and the internet itself has been carving up every interaction that can be usefully computer mediated by a handful of super-scale vendors.
- mattnewton 9y ago
  Do you think Amazon, Facebook or Google won’t buy out their would-be destroyers, regulators willing? And I don’t see any signs of unwilling regulators lately.
  - b4lancesh33t 9y ago
    Yahoo didn't when they had the chance. I mean I'm sure they'd love to if they can but will they see it coming early enough?
  - felipeko 9y ago
    When Facebook was growing there was a fear on Google that Facebook would lead to Google's irrelevance. Google+ was a very clear response to that. Still, Google couldn't buy Facebook and couldn't kill it. Microsoft couldn't kill/buy Google, Walmart can't kill/buy Amazon. Microsoft and Walmart are still big, but not that powerful anymore. So while i think they can buy their would be destroyers, that is actually very hard, because they mostly only realize that too late, or are stopped by something else (Microsoft did buy shares of Facebook before Google).
    - sien 9y ago
      And IBM didn't get to buy MS. Where is Commodore now? DEC? SGI? Intergraph? From 1955 to 2016 only 12% of firms remain in the Fortune 500. It's not clear that this sort of churn isn't still happening: http://www.aei.org/publication/fortune-500-firms-1955-v-2016-only-12-remain-thanks-to-the-creative-destruction-that-fuels-economic-prosperity/ http://www.aei.org/publication/fortune-500-firms-1955-v-2016... However, it's also worth noting that no churn would take a long time to show up.
      - WalterBright 9y ago
        > From 1955 to 2016 only 12% of firms remain in the Fortune 500. I used to have a chart which showed the top 10 corporations by market cap, decade by decade. You didn't have to go very far back before you didn't even recognize the company names. I'm old enough to remember all the fear IBM struck into the hearts of everyone in the computer biz in the 1980s, fear that seems so laughable now it's hard to even remember it. Same thing in the 1990s, but with Microsoft. Other companies that inspired fear and certainty they'd take over the world - HP, AT&T, RCA. RCA? Anybody even recall that RCA was the name of a company, and not just the plug ends on your stereo equipment? Anyone remember that old WKRP episode where they were making fun of the fear of "The Phone Company", i.e. AT&T? There's a good reason for the decline of large corporations - they get too bureaucratic and complicated to manage efficiently. They tend to accumulate too much entrenched interest in obsolete models and technology. I.e. the world passes them by.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Yes, but patent portfolios are a sought after asset in liquidations or acquisitions of failing giants.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    Patents expire.
- jordanb 9y ago
  What you see with the collapse of these companies is more concentration of market power, not less.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    Please explain this with Kodak.
    - jordanb 9y ago
      I know you're being coy picking the example from your list where the market leader wasn't simply forced out by an even bigger market leader. But in fact we have seen a lot of consolidation in the photographic industry. Back in the days of film everyone had to choose from a select few manufactures of chemical film. but people who created photography had a wide variety of equipment manufacturers to choose from, and those who did it professionally had a wide variety of sales channels into which to sell what they produced. Good photography was valuable and many thousands of people could support themselves as freelance photographers. Now we still have a decent set of SLR vendors. There's Nikon, Canon, Sony. Um, probably some Chinese manufacturers. The point and shoot market has been eclipsed by the camera phone, for which there are now exactly two platform providers. But the collapse in price of photographs also produced a collapse in value of photography. All those freelancers found their sales channels dry up. There wasn't Look or Life or Nat Geo or hundreds of other publishers who needed photographs and were willing to pay top dollar for excellent work. Instead photographers found themselves trying to sell the rights for pennies on a few photo agency platforms, or more likely surviving entirely on event work. The choke point at film manufacturing went away for sure, but we have a new choke point at the publishing and delivery end, and this choke point exerts vastly more control over the entire industry than the film duopoly ever did.
      - WalterBright 9y ago
        I can take a photo, post it on reddit, and get instant worldwide distribution. So can anyone else. https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/ There's a long list of such platforms anyone can upload pictures to. Or they can make their own websites. Anyone can do this. Sorry, I don't see any "choke point".
- coliveira 9y ago
  This is irrelevant when the problem we are considering is concentration of the market forces. Of course in this process many large firms will be swallowed by even larger companies. Market concentration doesn't guarantee that large companies will continue to exist, only that the remaining ones will own most everything.
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    And the shareholders of the companies that swallow or replace older companies most likely will be the same to a large extent.

djrobstep 9y ago

All markets are "artificial". Intellectual property is no different to other forms of property in this regard. Both require a government to enforce the laws that create them.

dredmorbius 9y ago
There are markets and exchanges in which enforcement is strictly by force. Not particularly vibrant markets, mind, but they do exist. There may be international or extranational markets outside any particular jurisdiction. A market is an exchange interface. There is a wide range of applicable governing models.
dnautics 9y ago
If someone scams me on Bitcoin, what government can I appeal to have the laws enforced on the transaction?

sitkack 9y ago

Not often addressed in the largest of internet companies is how little the pay for bandwidth and transit. Google literally pays ZERO for internet access in either direction since they bought so much fiber in late 90s early 2000s. This is how they can run search (both directions) and youtube.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]