4 ms·

fwiw, I believe if you ask anyone who has interacted with any of the relevant (to competition) agencies globally, any law/rule which gives them more power is ob

fwiw, I believe if you ask anyone who has interacted with any of the relevant (to competition) agencies globally, any law/rule which gives them more power is obviously bad. The humans who work there tend to be clueless about the specifics of an industry and imagine all kinds of nefarious intent everywhere. They are often intelligent people, but just don't understand the industry.

tablespoon 4y ago
> The humans who work there tend to be clueless about the specifics of an industry and imagine all kinds of nefarious intent everywhere. They are often intelligent people, but just don't understand the industry. Sometimes that's a good thing. "Understand[ing] the industry" often means buying into its bullshit and looking at the world from its self-interested perspective.
- danielmarkbruce 4y ago
  Fair point.
Karunamon 4y ago
I mean this with complete sincerity but perhaps given current market, business, and global conditions, perhaps we should assume nefarious intent anytime a company breaks a rule in a way that causes them to profit? It's not like evil or shady behavior is in short supply.
- danielmarkbruce 4y ago
  The question is mostly what should the rules be, and how much leeway do you give an administrative agency to decide what they are and if they are being broken. At least in the US, there is a very reasonable argument that the administrative agencies have overstepped. As an example, from the FTC: "Unfair methods of competition, the policy statement explains, are tactics that seek to gain an advantage while avoiding competing on the merits, and that tend to reduce competition in the market". Who decides what "the merits" are, and who decides what the "market" is? They play a lot of games with these definitions. What are the merits in the smartphone business? Did apple abuse their position to unfairly take over the camera business? Is "cameras" even a market anymore? Is a camera so clearly part of a smartphone that it does indeed meet the definition of "merits"? Is Amazon abusing their position in e-commerce to take out the delivery business (fedex etc) by offering "free shipping" ? Is AWS abusing their position in IaaS to unfairly compete in the "server cpu" market? Is that even a market? Or is it not because x86 chips and ARM chips are thought of as different? Read the current case brought against Meta. The definition of "market" is... really pretty awful. Someone is just trying to make their career.
  - vkou 4y ago
    > At least in the US, there is a very reasonable argument that the administrative agencies have overstepped. Only if you ignore most of the text of the congressional acts that have created them. If the FTC's charter consisted of that one paragraph, it would be a reasonable criticism. It doesn't, and it's not. It's true that there's a reactionary movement in the current SCOTUS that comes up with very odd interpretations of these congressional acts (like concluding that CO2 is not a pollutant, and thereby can't be regulated as one), but just because Amy Coney legislates from the bench that the sky is green doesn't necessarily make it so.
  - divyekapoor 4y ago
    This reply is spot on. A vague policy statement means that the FTC itself can't be and won't be held to any standard. They might define Ecommerce one way when it helps with Amazon's prosecution and define it another way to help with Facebook and Google's prosecution. I read the policy statement - it's so broad that it's meaningless. Just lobby the politicians and hope and pray they keep the FTC at bay is not the way to run a developed country.
rodgerd 4y ago
Yes, letting Boeing tell the FAA whether their planes are safe has worked so well.
- danielmarkbruce 4y ago
  I'm talking the agencies who get involved in competition law. In the US that's the FTC and the DOJ, and others in different jurisdictions. It's pretty different from the FAA. The FAA is the aviation authority. They are presumably stacked with folks who understand a lot about aviation.
vkou 4y ago
> fwiw, I believe if you ask anyone who has interacted with any of the relevant (to competition) agencies globally, any law/rule which gives them more power is obviously bad. And if you've ever interacted with an abusive corporation, you'll see that any rule, or lack of rule, which gives them more power over you, their customer/employee is obviously bad. I, as a customer/employee/tenant would generally like my bank to not run off with my money after betting it all on red, my employer to not retaliate against me for reporting abuse, and my landlord to not throw me out on my ass because I complained about a rat infestation in his building. Without any rules against unethical behavior, most organizations with power over you will happily turn to it, and will drive their more ethical competitors out of business.
- danielmarkbruce 4y ago
  Tis true. It's a conundrum. Do you give power to the regulator which will help them stop the bad guys, but also enable them to be bad guys at the cost of the good companies, or not? Free market folks argue that the market can figure out every one of those things you mention. But most of them understand it isn't a free lunch.
  - vkou 4y ago
    It is a conundrum, and it is one of the hardest political problems for humans to solve. It's half the reason we have politics. I generally think that a case-by-case approach, with clear avenues for both rulemaking and redress, with democratic (direct or representative) control is a good starting point for solving this conundrum. I allude to the problem of finding market solutions for ethics problems in the last part of my previous point. Markets do not optimize for ethical behaviour. Largely because of information assymetries, largely because people are not perfectly rational agents, largely because of the power imbalance that exists in many of them, and also largely because people are poor at measuring specific examples of long-tail risk. Good rules also reduce market friction, because they let me make reasonable assumptions, like 'This product is probably not going to kill me when used as instructed, because it adheres to X, Y, Z objective standards', instead of having to go down an endless rabbit hole of 'Buyer beware, do your own research!'
rz2k 4y ago
For a while I reread William Langwiesche's 2003 article in The Atlantic* about Columbia's last flight[1] every year or so. I find it very easy to empathize with the insiders who actually understand all of the minutiae and imagine the frustration of dealing with outsiders who didn't understand any of the details or all the decision processes you and your team had already been through. The point was that I didn't want to make the same mistakes, and I wanted to remind myself to be wary of "inside scoop" types of opinions, or placing too much weight on "reports from the frontlines", because I recognized that I was overly biased in this direction. Outsiders views, or fresh perspectives, as well as insights from a big picture also have value. Every long gone institution or industry that now seems absurd with hindsight, also necessarily had some internal logic if it ever existed for decades. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/11/columbias-last-flight/304204/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/11/columbi...

tablespoon 4y ago

> The humans who work there tend to be clueless about the specifics of an industry and imagine all kinds of nefarious intent everywhere. They are often intelligent people, but just don't understand the industry. Sometimes that's a good thing. "Understand[ing] the industry" often means buying into its bullshit and looking at the world from its self-interested perspective.

danielmarkbruce 4y ago
Fair point.

Karunamon 4y ago

I mean this with complete sincerity but perhaps given current market, business, and global conditions, perhaps we should assume nefarious intent anytime a company breaks a rule in a way that causes them to profit? It's not like evil or shady behavior is in short supply.

danielmarkbruce 4y ago
The question is mostly what should the rules be, and how much leeway do you give an administrative agency to decide what they are and if they are being broken. At least in the US, there is a very reasonable argument that the administrative agencies have overstepped. As an example, from the FTC: "Unfair methods of competition, the policy statement explains, are tactics that seek to gain an advantage while avoiding competing on the merits, and that tend to reduce competition in the market". Who decides what "the merits" are, and who decides what the "market" is? They play a lot of games with these definitions. What are the merits in the smartphone business? Did apple abuse their position to unfairly take over the camera business? Is "cameras" even a market anymore? Is a camera so clearly part of a smartphone that it does indeed meet the definition of "merits"? Is Amazon abusing their position in e-commerce to take out the delivery business (fedex etc) by offering "free shipping" ? Is AWS abusing their position in IaaS to unfairly compete in the "server cpu" market? Is that even a market? Or is it not because x86 chips and ARM chips are thought of as different? Read the current case brought against Meta. The definition of "market" is... really pretty awful. Someone is just trying to make their career.
- vkou 4y ago
  > At least in the US, there is a very reasonable argument that the administrative agencies have overstepped. Only if you ignore most of the text of the congressional acts that have created them. If the FTC's charter consisted of that one paragraph, it would be a reasonable criticism. It doesn't, and it's not. It's true that there's a reactionary movement in the current SCOTUS that comes up with very odd interpretations of these congressional acts (like concluding that CO2 is not a pollutant, and thereby can't be regulated as one), but just because Amy Coney legislates from the bench that the sky is green doesn't necessarily make it so.
- divyekapoor 4y ago
  This reply is spot on. A vague policy statement means that the FTC itself can't be and won't be held to any standard. They might define Ecommerce one way when it helps with Amazon's prosecution and define it another way to help with Facebook and Google's prosecution. I read the policy statement - it's so broad that it's meaningless. Just lobby the politicians and hope and pray they keep the FTC at bay is not the way to run a developed country.

rodgerd 4y ago

Yes, letting Boeing tell the FAA whether their planes are safe has worked so well.

danielmarkbruce 4y ago
I'm talking the agencies who get involved in competition law. In the US that's the FTC and the DOJ, and others in different jurisdictions. It's pretty different from the FAA. The FAA is the aviation authority. They are presumably stacked with folks who understand a lot about aviation.

vkou 4y ago

> fwiw, I believe if you ask anyone who has interacted with any of the relevant (to competition) agencies globally, any law/rule which gives them more power is obviously bad. And if you've ever interacted with an abusive corporation, you'll see that any rule, or lack of rule, which gives them more power over you, their customer/employee is obviously bad. I, as a customer/employee/tenant would generally like my bank to not run off with my money after betting it all on red, my employer to not retaliate against me for reporting abuse, and my landlord to not throw me out on my ass because I complained about a rat infestation in his building. Without any rules against unethical behavior, most organizations with power over you will happily turn to it, and will drive their more ethical competitors out of business.

danielmarkbruce 4y ago
Tis true. It's a conundrum. Do you give power to the regulator which will help them stop the bad guys, but also enable them to be bad guys at the cost of the good companies, or not? Free market folks argue that the market can figure out every one of those things you mention. But most of them understand it isn't a free lunch.
- vkou 4y ago
  It is a conundrum, and it is one of the hardest political problems for humans to solve. It's half the reason we have politics. I generally think that a case-by-case approach, with clear avenues for both rulemaking and redress, with democratic (direct or representative) control is a good starting point for solving this conundrum. I allude to the problem of finding market solutions for ethics problems in the last part of my previous point. Markets do not optimize for ethical behaviour. Largely because of information assymetries, largely because people are not perfectly rational agents, largely because of the power imbalance that exists in many of them, and also largely because people are poor at measuring specific examples of long-tail risk. Good rules also reduce market friction, because they let me make reasonable assumptions, like 'This product is probably not going to kill me when used as instructed, because it adheres to X, Y, Z objective standards', instead of having to go down an endless rabbit hole of 'Buyer beware, do your own research!'

rz2k 4y ago

For a while I reread William Langwiesche's 2003 article in The Atlantic* about Columbia's last flight[1] every year or so. I find it very easy to empathize with the insiders who actually understand all of the minutiae and imagine the frustration of dealing with outsiders who didn't understand any of the details or all the decision processes you and your team had already been through. The point was that I didn't want to make the same mistakes, and I wanted to remind myself to be wary of "inside scoop" types of opinions, or placing too much weight on "reports from the frontlines", because I recognized that I was overly biased in this direction. Outsiders views, or fresh perspectives, as well as insights from a big picture also have value. Every long gone institution or industry that now seems absurd with hindsight, also necessarily had some internal logic if it ever existed for decades. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/11/columbias-last-flight/304204/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/11/columbi...