10 ms·

I'm not really sure I understand the outrage here. Just because the marginal cost of something is low/zero doesn't mean companies shouldn't charge for it. Shou

I'm not really sure I understand the outrage here. Just because the marginal cost of something is low/zero doesn't mean companies shouldn't charge for it. Should an indie software developer using a freemium model be crucified because the binary they ship already contains the code for full functionality? Of course not. The cost is in developing the binary, not in manufacturing it. Same goes for silicon. Also, "rent seeking" does not mean what most people in this thread seem to think it does. Economic rents are a very specific phenomenon and it simply does not mean charging for something that is perceived as being low/no effort.

raxxorrax 5y ago
The problem is that this can be arbitrary if the market doesn't supply enough competitors. I don't think Intel is in a position to enforce this, but the competitors that would prohibit them from implementing such restrictions are fairly weak in numbers. AMD alone isn't enough regardless of whether they ship superior products or not. It also tells me about the focus of Intel and who is in charge of the company. They have many flawed products lately and they seem to not want to compete on a technological level anymore. That said, proprietary DSP aren't unusual. It would still a shame if they find their way into general computing too a larger degree. Can make sense for the line of XEON CPU perhaps. I just wouldn't buy them really.
- qeternity 5y ago
  > The problem is that this can be arbitrary if the market doesn't supply enough competitors. What is this referring to? What is the problem? And why is this problem arbitrary? > It also tells me about the focus of Intel and who is in charge of the company. They have many flawed products lately and they seem to not want to compete on a technological level anymore. Ok, that's one take and you're certainly entitled to it. As someone who personally had to replace some hardware so I could use ecc ram in a zfs nas for my media server, I would have loved to just pay a few bucks to get a microcode update instead of a full hardware upgrade. Now, you can complain that ecc should be standard, etc but that's a different discussion. But it's classic economic theory: if Intel can charge some people more for ecc, and charge other people less who don't want it, that is an optimal pricing strategy.
  - b112 5y ago
    It is where it will end up, and that's phoning home, online verification, and more. And intel already has parallel software running on intel systems, including access to the nic, which is impossible to shut off at the OS layer, so yeah.. they can do that. (but outrageous, you say! and people will complain. naw. IME has been around forever, no one cares, it has had zero days, you cannot deactivate it, so a little phoning home and license authorization won't matter. This also means your cpu can expire because intel says so.... )
    - qeternity 5y ago
      Fine, I would agree with you on much of this. But those are different issues. And I don’t think a slippery slope argument applies as you note Intel has been pushing this stuff for a while. So from a purely price discrimination perspective, I think this is a good thing, even if Intel are doing a lot of other shady things in parallel.
      - southerntofu 5y ago
        > So from a purely price discrimination perspective, I think this is a good thing This kind of setup never benefits users. It only allows corporations producing a product for <100$ to sell variations of it up to thousands of dollars. See also Canon cameras or nvidia graphics cards doing precisely that: locking/reducing features via software cuffs (and of course you can find cracked firmware to go around those, just makes it harder). Greed is a bad way to organize society: it has failed us as a species and threatens to destroy millions of other species along with it. We need to build a needs-based economy that is not dictated by private corporations.
        qeternity 5y ago
        > This kind of setup never benefits users. You’ll be hard pressed to find an economist that agrees with you. If Canon sold one camera, they would have to find the profit maximizing price and quantity. By definition this means that single product will have too many features and too expensive for some people, and have too few features for other people who would be willing to pay more. So instead they make multiple products with different functionality so that people can decide. I’m surprised to have to be defending greater consumer choice in HN?!?
ksec 5y ago
Modern Day Tech people seems to have this traits where everything should be free. Without ever giving some thoughts on how business and economics model should work, while getting $200K for entry level junior job from MAMAA. It is strange and I cant comprehend why this is happening. Assuming this could be done securely and somehow even on core count. Cloud vendors no longer needs to provision dozens ( if not hundreds ) of different SKUs, they could simplify their hardware unit to a few with maximum cooling installed. And be able to change and adopt requirement with software. Shortening lead time and capacity planning.
- gspr 5y ago
  > Modern Day Tech people seems to have this traits where everything should be free. How do you conclude like that from the current discussion? People seem to be arguing that they should be able to own things. Not that the things should be free. Do charge me extra for that extra hardware feature, but don't do so monthly.
  - ksec 5y ago
    Not the current discussion but just the general trend of discourse and observation. All Ads are bad, we should live in an ad free world. Charge for content and yet proven not to be a business model for a lot of media. ( It only works on Financial Times and the likes ) ISO standards should be free. Who is going to paid the employees of ISO organisation? 5G Patents are scam, why should they charge for standards usage? Who is paying for the Tech innovation within University Research and Telecom Industry spending billions every year. And the list goes on and on. There is clearly lots of value these brings to the table. I just dont understand why they should be free. And Why is this Intel Software activated Hardware Rent Seeking? The BOM cost of an Intel 10nm inclusive of testing and packing without their Foundry margin is practically a few dollars per core. One could even argue have all the different SKUS have different set of operational complexities. So why is this wrong?
    - gspr 5y ago
      > Not the current discussion but just the general trend of discourse and observation. Seems like a strange place to vent arguments for an unrelated discussion, then. > And Why is this Intel Software activated Hardware Rent Seeking? It's not. But if it's charged on a subscription basis, it obviously is.
temac 5y ago
> Same goes for silicon. Oh no, a big part of the cost is in the manufacturing. A non negligible part is also in logic R&D of course but this is not comparable (at all) with software, where the marginal cost of duplication is near zero. Now your reasoning is still kind of sound despite of this, but historically the customers have not liked that kind of initiatives for processors. Now I understand that Intel is less good on process nowadays, so it kind of make sense for them to concentrate more on design and on market segmentation at the design level even if that means to make it completely artificial (with SKUs, it could be partly artificial, but you had no warranty to get a chip better than its SKU, with that scheme you are guaranteed to get a chip better than what you can use - if you don't buy all the options, with all the testing guaranteed passed, etc.) IMO, this is not actually too bad as long as the pricing is not insane, and that depends (partly) on competition. Given some users do not like that approach at all, some competitors could even decide to not do that.
- qeternity 5y ago
  > Oh no, a big part of the cost is in the manufacturing. Not in the marginal cost which I was referring to. I absolutely know the fixed cost is a large part of this. But high fixed costs encourage price discrimination because that increases the quantity supplied to the market.
  - temac 5y ago
    The pure marginal cost of fabrication of a modern chips is not that cheap when seen in the context of production capacity (and with high demand you tend to concentrate on high-end anyway), and certainly not cheap compared to software, otherwise you would have even less kind of dies than you have today for the various SKUs, and less recovery strategies for various fabrication defects, plus Intel wants to fab for others, and they do not lead the process anymore. Also if you look at their current list of SKUs, that's already completely insane. Do they really need further discrimination on top of that and will they be able to extract tons of value? I'm not so sure. Thinking more about it maybe they simply want to keep roughly the same amount while doing less masks than usual because masks became crazy expensive. Would be interesting to look at some figures.
southerntofu 5y ago
> Just because the marginal cost of something is low/zero doesn't mean companies shouldn't charge for it. It definitely should. That's why some of the money collected beyond the "marginal cost" is invested in R&D (capitalism 101). Of course entire industries (health, IT, concrete..) have been used to living off siphoning public money from corrupt officials as grants and partnerships for R&D so they don't have to worry about anything but maximizing profits for their shareholders. But where is that model taking us? > Should an indie software developer using a freemium model be crucified because the binary they ship already contains the code for full functionality? Sure. Why is freemium even a thing? Would you imagine a music CD where a paid unique key is required to decrypt the 5 last tracks? Or a restaurant toilet where the toilet is free but you need 2$ more for toilet paper?! In principle, everything should be free for everyone because everything belongs to everyone. But even if you don't agree with this principle (why?), freemium is a fucked up model that only incentivizes producers fucking over users some way or another. > Economic rents are a very specific phenomenon and it simply does not mean charging for something that is perceived as being low/no effort. As an anarchist, i understand "rent" to be artificial value derived from "private property". Private property by definition is just a religious belief (materialized on a piece of paper, and guarded by the holy crusaders of the police), and does not involve efforts. The efforts to conceive and build the product (whether it's a CPU or a house) were provided beforehand, and by a different group of people than those reaping the benefits of this "rent". That's precisely why "property is theft": it creates debt from the users of a resource, to people who did not work to produce it (if there was any work involved at all, which may not be the case eg. for land ownership).
- qeternity 5y ago
  > In principle, everything should be free for everyone because everything belongs to everyone. Awesome. If I DM you my address, will you please ship me the device that you’re posting this from. It actually also belongs to me.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    Tongue-in-cheek answer: you'd be disappointed in my laptop. The keyboard has half missing keys, and it's an old Core 2 Duo with 4GB RAM. Residing in southern France, it'd probably be cheaper and more eco-friendly to find such hardware in your area ;) Serious answer: you're confusing private property with possession (usage-based property). Private property is the State-mandated religion (with which we're all brainwashed throughout school and on television) that says a piece of paper dictates who can or can't use a certain resource, and that the people who use it (eg. tenants) can't necessarily decide for it. Anarchism doesn't stand against personal possessions (everyone sleeping in dormitories is a McCarthyist strawman), on the contrary, it stands for the idea that the land belongs to whoever lives/works it. Your house is your house not because a piece of paper says so, but because you reside in it. A peasant's land is their land (whether individually or communally) not because a landlord said so, but because they work and care for it. Another way to look at it, is that if you are not a direct user of a certain resource, then you have no say in how it should be used. Why do the State and big corporations get to decide on how our neighborhoods should be managed, or to extract certain resources and pollute our water streams? Such decisions should belong to the people directly, not to some remote entity claiming legitimate exercise of power over the people.
LocalH 5y ago
I'm sorry, but if you ship something but lock it behind software, don't complain when people want to activate it. It's like games that offer "DLC" that consists of an unlock key for content that's already on the disc. We should not make it easier for the corporations to abuse us. And yes, if an indie software developer ships all the DLC and just sells license keys, I would crucify them. It's not "downloadable content" if you don't actually have to download it. As far as I'm concerned, if it ships, it's considered part of the base product. Don't want people hacking around to get the things you ship but don't want them to access? DON'T SHIP WHAT YOU DON'T WANT THEM TO HAVE WITHOUT PAYING THEN.
- 404mm 5y ago
  Both are good but somewhat extreme angles on this issue. Look at Tesla for example. You get all the hardware to support self driving but you have to pay a very significant amount to use it. You can be both upset that you have to pay 20% of car purchase price to unlock that feature (considering model 3 of course)- and understand that Tesla spends lot of expensive R&D time to develop it.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  Okay it's not downloadable content. It's just additional content which you can buy to access. By having it already downloaded you are improving the user experience.
  - LocalH 5y ago
    "Improving the user experience" by making them download extra data that is useless to them unless they pay additional fees? That's a weird definition of "improving" for me. In places where "unlimited" mobile data is not common, this raises costs for people to get the base product, and then they still have to pay to unlock data that is now already on their device.
    - charcircuit 5y ago
      >by making them download extra data that is useless to them unless they pay additional fees? We were talking about game discs. >In places where "unlimited" mobile data is not common, this raises costs for people to get the base product But it decreases the price of enhancing the product. >and then they still have to pay to unlock data that is now already on their device. What's wrong with that? There is plenty of software like that already. Take Microsoft Windows. The whole operating system is already there, you just need to enter a license to unlock everything. This applies to a lot of other software that has some sort of trial.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
badsectoracula 5y ago
> Should an indie software developer using a freemium model be crucified because the binary they ship already contains the code for full functionality? Funny, but before the washed out "indie software" term caught on, people called these sorts of shareware programs "crippleware". Which is basically what Intel is doing here, even if they claim they sell you additional features in reality they ask you to pay them for uncrippling their hardware. And at least with crippleware you got the program for free.
jeabays 5y ago
Love when all the liberal free market people here complain endlessly when the free market and corporations optimize for their profits. It's good for everyone, they said! Deregulation is good, they said! Corporate control of western governments is fine, they said, through the corporate controlled [1] media! 1. https://fortune.com/longform/media-company-ownership-consolidation/ https://fortune.com/longform/media-company-ownership-consoli...
jeegsy 5y ago
Except you are someone with "direct knowledge of the matter", you should not invent justifications for Intel's pricing strategy. If we knew specifically why they chose this strategy, then thats another matter. What I do know is that as consumers, we would definitely like to pay less if we can just like the company/vendors would like to pay more. Advocacy on behalf of corporations only serves to reduce our leverage in this regard.
dTal 5y ago
>Economic rents are a very specific phenomenon and it simply does not mean charging for something that is perceived as being low/no effort. I've seen this meme lately, always in defense of said "rent-seeking" behavior. But Wikipedia says: "economic rent is any payment to an owner or factor of production in excess of the costs needed to bring that factor into production" - in other words, exactly this.

raxxorrax 5y ago

The problem is that this can be arbitrary if the market doesn't supply enough competitors. I don't think Intel is in a position to enforce this, but the competitors that would prohibit them from implementing such restrictions are fairly weak in numbers. AMD alone isn't enough regardless of whether they ship superior products or not. It also tells me about the focus of Intel and who is in charge of the company. They have many flawed products lately and they seem to not want to compete on a technological level anymore. That said, proprietary DSP aren't unusual. It would still a shame if they find their way into general computing too a larger degree. Can make sense for the line of XEON CPU perhaps. I just wouldn't buy them really.

qeternity 5y ago
> The problem is that this can be arbitrary if the market doesn't supply enough competitors. What is this referring to? What is the problem? And why is this problem arbitrary? > It also tells me about the focus of Intel and who is in charge of the company. They have many flawed products lately and they seem to not want to compete on a technological level anymore. Ok, that's one take and you're certainly entitled to it. As someone who personally had to replace some hardware so I could use ecc ram in a zfs nas for my media server, I would have loved to just pay a few bucks to get a microcode update instead of a full hardware upgrade. Now, you can complain that ecc should be standard, etc but that's a different discussion. But it's classic economic theory: if Intel can charge some people more for ecc, and charge other people less who don't want it, that is an optimal pricing strategy.
- b112 5y ago
  It is where it will end up, and that's phoning home, online verification, and more. And intel already has parallel software running on intel systems, including access to the nic, which is impossible to shut off at the OS layer, so yeah.. they can do that. (but outrageous, you say! and people will complain. naw. IME has been around forever, no one cares, it has had zero days, you cannot deactivate it, so a little phoning home and license authorization won't matter. This also means your cpu can expire because intel says so.... )
  - qeternity 5y ago
    Fine, I would agree with you on much of this. But those are different issues. And I don’t think a slippery slope argument applies as you note Intel has been pushing this stuff for a while. So from a purely price discrimination perspective, I think this is a good thing, even if Intel are doing a lot of other shady things in parallel.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      > So from a purely price discrimination perspective, I think this is a good thing This kind of setup never benefits users. It only allows corporations producing a product for <100$ to sell variations of it up to thousands of dollars. See also Canon cameras or nvidia graphics cards doing precisely that: locking/reducing features via software cuffs (and of course you can find cracked firmware to go around those, just makes it harder). Greed is a bad way to organize society: it has failed us as a species and threatens to destroy millions of other species along with it. We need to build a needs-based economy that is not dictated by private corporations.
      - qeternity 5y ago
        > This kind of setup never benefits users. You’ll be hard pressed to find an economist that agrees with you. If Canon sold one camera, they would have to find the profit maximizing price and quantity. By definition this means that single product will have too many features and too expensive for some people, and have too few features for other people who would be willing to pay more. So instead they make multiple products with different functionality so that people can decide. I’m surprised to have to be defending greater consumer choice in HN?!?

ksec 5y ago

Modern Day Tech people seems to have this traits where everything should be free. Without ever giving some thoughts on how business and economics model should work, while getting $200K for entry level junior job from MAMAA. It is strange and I cant comprehend why this is happening. Assuming this could be done securely and somehow even on core count. Cloud vendors no longer needs to provision dozens ( if not hundreds ) of different SKUs, they could simplify their hardware unit to a few with maximum cooling installed. And be able to change and adopt requirement with software. Shortening lead time and capacity planning.

gspr 5y ago
> Modern Day Tech people seems to have this traits where everything should be free. How do you conclude like that from the current discussion? People seem to be arguing that they should be able to own things. Not that the things should be free. Do charge me extra for that extra hardware feature, but don't do so monthly.
- ksec 5y ago
  Not the current discussion but just the general trend of discourse and observation. All Ads are bad, we should live in an ad free world. Charge for content and yet proven not to be a business model for a lot of media. ( It only works on Financial Times and the likes ) ISO standards should be free. Who is going to paid the employees of ISO organisation? 5G Patents are scam, why should they charge for standards usage? Who is paying for the Tech innovation within University Research and Telecom Industry spending billions every year. And the list goes on and on. There is clearly lots of value these brings to the table. I just dont understand why they should be free. And Why is this Intel Software activated Hardware Rent Seeking? The BOM cost of an Intel 10nm inclusive of testing and packing without their Foundry margin is practically a few dollars per core. One could even argue have all the different SKUS have different set of operational complexities. So why is this wrong?
  - gspr 5y ago
    > Not the current discussion but just the general trend of discourse and observation. Seems like a strange place to vent arguments for an unrelated discussion, then. > And Why is this Intel Software activated Hardware Rent Seeking? It's not. But if it's charged on a subscription basis, it obviously is.

temac 5y ago

> Same goes for silicon. Oh no, a big part of the cost is in the manufacturing. A non negligible part is also in logic R&D of course but this is not comparable (at all) with software, where the marginal cost of duplication is near zero. Now your reasoning is still kind of sound despite of this, but historically the customers have not liked that kind of initiatives for processors. Now I understand that Intel is less good on process nowadays, so it kind of make sense for them to concentrate more on design and on market segmentation at the design level even if that means to make it completely artificial (with SKUs, it could be partly artificial, but you had no warranty to get a chip better than its SKU, with that scheme you are guaranteed to get a chip better than what you can use - if you don't buy all the options, with all the testing guaranteed passed, etc.) IMO, this is not actually too bad as long as the pricing is not insane, and that depends (partly) on competition. Given some users do not like that approach at all, some competitors could even decide to not do that.

qeternity 5y ago
> Oh no, a big part of the cost is in the manufacturing. Not in the marginal cost which I was referring to. I absolutely know the fixed cost is a large part of this. But high fixed costs encourage price discrimination because that increases the quantity supplied to the market.
- temac 5y ago
  The pure marginal cost of fabrication of a modern chips is not that cheap when seen in the context of production capacity (and with high demand you tend to concentrate on high-end anyway), and certainly not cheap compared to software, otherwise you would have even less kind of dies than you have today for the various SKUs, and less recovery strategies for various fabrication defects, plus Intel wants to fab for others, and they do not lead the process anymore. Also if you look at their current list of SKUs, that's already completely insane. Do they really need further discrimination on top of that and will they be able to extract tons of value? I'm not so sure. Thinking more about it maybe they simply want to keep roughly the same amount while doing less masks than usual because masks became crazy expensive. Would be interesting to look at some figures.

southerntofu 5y ago

> Just because the marginal cost of something is low/zero doesn't mean companies shouldn't charge for it. It definitely should. That's why some of the money collected beyond the "marginal cost" is invested in R&D (capitalism 101). Of course entire industries (health, IT, concrete..) have been used to living off siphoning public money from corrupt officials as grants and partnerships for R&D so they don't have to worry about anything but maximizing profits for their shareholders. But where is that model taking us? > Should an indie software developer using a freemium model be crucified because the binary they ship already contains the code for full functionality? Sure. Why is freemium even a thing? Would you imagine a music CD where a paid unique key is required to decrypt the 5 last tracks? Or a restaurant toilet where the toilet is free but you need 2$ more for toilet paper?! In principle, everything should be free for everyone because everything belongs to everyone. But even if you don't agree with this principle (why?), freemium is a fucked up model that only incentivizes producers fucking over users some way or another. > Economic rents are a very specific phenomenon and it simply does not mean charging for something that is perceived as being low/no effort. As an anarchist, i understand "rent" to be artificial value derived from "private property". Private property by definition is just a religious belief (materialized on a piece of paper, and guarded by the holy crusaders of the police), and does not involve efforts. The efforts to conceive and build the product (whether it's a CPU or a house) were provided beforehand, and by a different group of people than those reaping the benefits of this "rent". That's precisely why "property is theft": it creates debt from the users of a resource, to people who did not work to produce it (if there was any work involved at all, which may not be the case eg. for land ownership).

qeternity 5y ago
> In principle, everything should be free for everyone because everything belongs to everyone. Awesome. If I DM you my address, will you please ship me the device that you’re posting this from. It actually also belongs to me.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  Tongue-in-cheek answer: you'd be disappointed in my laptop. The keyboard has half missing keys, and it's an old Core 2 Duo with 4GB RAM. Residing in southern France, it'd probably be cheaper and more eco-friendly to find such hardware in your area ;) Serious answer: you're confusing private property with possession (usage-based property). Private property is the State-mandated religion (with which we're all brainwashed throughout school and on television) that says a piece of paper dictates who can or can't use a certain resource, and that the people who use it (eg. tenants) can't necessarily decide for it. Anarchism doesn't stand against personal possessions (everyone sleeping in dormitories is a McCarthyist strawman), on the contrary, it stands for the idea that the land belongs to whoever lives/works it. Your house is your house not because a piece of paper says so, but because you reside in it. A peasant's land is their land (whether individually or communally) not because a landlord said so, but because they work and care for it. Another way to look at it, is that if you are not a direct user of a certain resource, then you have no say in how it should be used. Why do the State and big corporations get to decide on how our neighborhoods should be managed, or to extract certain resources and pollute our water streams? Such decisions should belong to the people directly, not to some remote entity claiming legitimate exercise of power over the people.

LocalH 5y ago

I'm sorry, but if you ship something but lock it behind software, don't complain when people want to activate it. It's like games that offer "DLC" that consists of an unlock key for content that's already on the disc. We should not make it easier for the corporations to abuse us. And yes, if an indie software developer ships all the DLC and just sells license keys, I would crucify them. It's not "downloadable content" if you don't actually have to download it. As far as I'm concerned, if it ships, it's considered part of the base product. Don't want people hacking around to get the things you ship but don't want them to access? DON'T SHIP WHAT YOU DON'T WANT THEM TO HAVE WITHOUT PAYING THEN.

404mm 5y ago
Both are good but somewhat extreme angles on this issue. Look at Tesla for example. You get all the hardware to support self driving but you have to pay a very significant amount to use it. You can be both upset that you have to pay 20% of car purchase price to unlock that feature (considering model 3 of course)- and understand that Tesla spends lot of expensive R&D time to develop it.
charcircuit 5y ago
Okay it's not downloadable content. It's just additional content which you can buy to access. By having it already downloaded you are improving the user experience.
- LocalH 5y ago
  "Improving the user experience" by making them download extra data that is useless to them unless they pay additional fees? That's a weird definition of "improving" for me. In places where "unlimited" mobile data is not common, this raises costs for people to get the base product, and then they still have to pay to unlock data that is now already on their device.
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    >by making them download extra data that is useless to them unless they pay additional fees? We were talking about game discs. >In places where "unlimited" mobile data is not common, this raises costs for people to get the base product But it decreases the price of enhancing the product. >and then they still have to pay to unlock data that is now already on their device. What's wrong with that? There is plenty of software like that already. Take Microsoft Windows. The whole operating system is already there, you just need to enter a license to unlock everything. This applies to a lot of other software that has some sort of trial.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

badsectoracula 5y ago

> Should an indie software developer using a freemium model be crucified because the binary they ship already contains the code for full functionality? Funny, but before the washed out "indie software" term caught on, people called these sorts of shareware programs "crippleware". Which is basically what Intel is doing here, even if they claim they sell you additional features in reality they ask you to pay them for uncrippling their hardware. And at least with crippleware you got the program for free.

jeabays 5y ago

Love when all the liberal free market people here complain endlessly when the free market and corporations optimize for their profits. It's good for everyone, they said! Deregulation is good, they said! Corporate control of western governments is fine, they said, through the corporate controlled [1] media! 1. https://fortune.com/longform/media-company-ownership-consolidation/ https://fortune.com/longform/media-company-ownership-consoli...

jeegsy 5y ago

Except you are someone with "direct knowledge of the matter", you should not invent justifications for Intel's pricing strategy. If we knew specifically why they chose this strategy, then thats another matter. What I do know is that as consumers, we would definitely like to pay less if we can just like the company/vendors would like to pay more. Advocacy on behalf of corporations only serves to reduce our leverage in this regard.

dTal 5y ago

>Economic rents are a very specific phenomenon and it simply does not mean charging for something that is perceived as being low/no effort. I've seen this meme lately, always in defense of said "rent-seeking" behavior. But Wikipedia says: "economic rent is any payment to an owner or factor of production in excess of the costs needed to bring that factor into production" - in other words, exactly this.