4 ms·

Politicians love Big companies. Look at the last EU's Draghi report, not a single small/medium company in the list of contributors.

by zoobab 2y ago

paganel 2y ago
Too bad that European history is filled with former autocrats/dictators who had gotten into power especially on the back of disgruntled small/medium business owners, the Nazis themselves had in their programme at some point the dismantling of big (and Jewish-owned) general stores so that the small store owners could have a chance (that didn't happen once they got into power, they just took over ownership from the Jewish).
vvpan 2y ago
The guy who made Nomad List and a bunch of other websites said on twitter that he was contacted by Draghi for the report.
WalterBright 2y ago
In the 90's, Microsoft proudly gave no money to politicians. Look what happened - an attack by the government on rather nebulous anti-trust charges. (Really - giving away a free browser harms consumers?) This all stopped when Microsoft learned that when you're a big company, you'd better pay tribute (political contributions). The winning strategy is to contribute to both sides.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  Yes giving a browser away harms consumers. It’s bundling and dumping to kill competitors.
  - benoau 2y ago
    It’s also worth noting at that time downloading an alternative browser probably over “dial up” was likely to take a couple of hours when you also had usage quotas and fees based on connection duration!
    - gruez 2y ago
      Fact check: firefox 1.0 (released in 2004) was only 5MB [1], which takes only 15 minutes to download on a 54 kb/s dial up connection[2] [1] https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/1.0/win32/en-US/ https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/1.0/win32/en-US... [2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=6+MB+at+54kb%2Fs https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=6+MB+at+54kb%2Fs
      - benoau 2y ago
        That was the fastest a dial up modem could be, many modems were a fraction of that speed. And this was Netscape, not Firefox, you need to go back about ten years further. Edit: redoing the maths properly makes the 15 megabyte download in the late 90s take approximately: - 45 minutes at 56.6kb modem - 90 minutes at 28.8kb modem - 180 minutes at 14.4kb modem http://www.oldversion.com/windows/netscape/ http://www.oldversion.com/windows/netscape/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape > Microsoft released version 1.0 of Internet Explorer as a part of the Windows 95 Plus Pack add-on. According to former Spyglass developer Eric Sink, Internet Explorer was based not on NCSA Mosaic as commonly believed, but on a version of Mosaic developed at Spyglass[33] (which itself was based upon NCSA Mosaic). > This period of time would become known as the browser wars. Netscape Navigator was not free to the general public until January 1998,[34] while Internet Explorer and Internet Information Server have always been free or came bundled with an operating system and/or other applications. Meanwhile, Netscape faced increasing criticism for "featuritis" – putting a higher priority on adding new features than on making their products work properly. Netscape experienced its first bad quarter at the end of 1997 and underwent a large round of layoffs in January 1998.
        gruez 2y ago
        >And this was Netscape, not Firefox, you need to go back about ten years further. Software tends to get bigger as time goes on, not smaller. Therefore the size of firefox in 2004 should be an upper bound for a browser back in the 90s.
        2y ago
  - s_m_t 2y ago
    I don't get it are operating systems and computers supposed to ship without web browsers? You could argue literally any feature is put into a product to 'bundle and dump' to kill competitors. Why is a web browser something that should be a paid product with a so called competitive market to begin with? Windows also comes with USB drivers but hypothetically I could drive down to Best Buy and choose from a number of different USB drivers I would have to pay for separately (I guess I should pick up a web browser too apparently). This would be preferable why?
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      Exactly. The whole case was simply an attack on Microsoft because Microsoft was a big target that (stupidly) dissed the DoJ.
    - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
      > I don't get it are operating systems and computers supposed to ship without web browsers? You could argue literally any feature is put into a product to 'bundle and dump' to kill competitors. A browser was a separate product at the time, not a feature. Microsoft bundled, as they have done many other times, for anticompetitive reasons.
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        Cars today come bundled with stereos and navigators. Should they be charged?
        chii 2y ago
        only if the big car manufacturer made their own stereos/nagivators, and refused to do business with other vendors of such components in order to lock them out of the market.
        WalterBright 2y ago
        Sounds like you think they should be charged.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    Consumers at the time had other browsers they could install and use. There was no impediment to it.
- gruez 2y ago
  >This all stopped when Microsoft learned that when you're a big company, you'd better pay tribute (political contributions). The winning strategy is to contribute to both sides. Source? It seems equally plausible that it stopped because Microsoft won on appeal and the government got spooked and didn't want to prosecute a losing case.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    > A losing case And there you go. There was a picture just before that of Bill Gates riding on a golf cart with Bill Clinton. And then the case was dropped. Things that make you go hmmmm....
- labster 2y ago
  It’s a good thing we only have two sides in America. Can you imagine if companies had to contribute to as many parties as Europeans have? No wonder we’re more competitive here.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    When you're big, it's a cost of doing business.
  - em-bee 2y ago
    you only need to contribute to the winning parties
- bantunes 2y ago
  "Rather nebulous"? What's nebulous about leveraging your position on the market to drown out competitors with a free browser bundled with your operating system? If Amazon redirected all search results of a product to their own version of it, omitting all others - would that be nebulous as well?
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    The real reason Netscape failed was their browser stunk. I know because I used both of them. Netscape crashed constantly. Explorer crashed too, but not nearly as often. That's why people switched to Explorer. Netscape ran crying to the government. That whole shtick about Explorer being uninstallable was ludicrous and irrelevant. Nothing stopped a user from installing another browser and using it. These days, a free browser is included with about every device.
    - bantunes 2y ago
      Non-technical users leave defaults on all the time - do you really think there wasn't a sense in some people IE _was_ the internet? Don't you think MS wanted it that way? The "Connect to the Internet" icon on Windows 98's desktop had the IE icon on it! And this wasn't "these days" when "a free browser is included with every device", it was 1998. I think you're being dense on purpose.
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        Microsoft included a number of utilities with its operating system - like a text editor - that operating systems have included since the beginning. There's no magic line that says a browser cannot be included.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Yes, really. By using their profits from other areas to drive Netscape out of business, consumers were harmed. This was shown in trial and Microsoft found to have violated antitrust laws.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    No, nobody ever identified any "harm" at trial. I started out using Netscape (amazingly, it wasn't any trouble getting and installing). The "harm" I experienced was Netflix crashed constantly. So I tried Explorer. Explorer crashed about 90% less. That was the end of Netflix. The horrible, dirty deed Microsoft did was write a better browser.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      The harms identified in the trial were reduced consumer choice, stifled innovation, exclusionary tactics, predatory pricing, and monopoly maintenance.
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        Except that none of those hold up under scrutiny.
        _DeadFred_ 2y ago
        Right, because post these events software didn't devolve to 'free software' that only costs 'all your privacy and personal information' as that is the only funding method able to compete with 'free'.
    - piva00 2y ago
      > The horrible, dirty deed Microsoft did was write a better browser. No, the dirty deed was using their monopolist power to undercut another browser by bundling their offering with the OS. Please, Walter, your takes are getting a tad way overboard with the anti-regulation stuff, you are stopping to think rationally to become an ideologue. You are smarter than that, at least by your technical achievements you should be.
- piva00 2y ago
  > (Really - giving away a free browser harms consumers?) Really, it does, and you were alive and on the internet at the time. You saw the rise of webpages that would only work on IE because it was bundled, you saw the demise of Netscape as a competitor because people wouldn't go through the motions of downloading another browser on a 28.8/56kbps connection. Price dumping with extra steps is still price dumping.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    As I remarked, I used Netscape first. I abandoned it for Explorer because Netscape crashed all the time, to the point of being unusuable. Explorer was simply better.
    - chii 2y ago
      whether iexplorer was better or not doesn't have anything to do with it being a subject of monopoly practises.
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        Of course it does. It is an explanation for why Explorer was preferred. Explorer was not forced on anybody.
  - ThrowawayB7 2y ago
    All preventing that got us was a Chrome browser monopoly instead by a business whose overwhelmingly dominant source of revenue was internet advertising, oops. Talk about going from the frying pan into the fire. We'd probably have come out better off with the Internet Explorer monopoly.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      At least Chrome will work on many different OSes, and [Chromium] is open-source so it can be compiled for anything. The problem with IE was that it forced everyone to buy and use Windows. If they had made it free and open-source so people could use it on any platform they wanted, it would have been fine.
tormeh 2y ago
Small companies don't have spare people to allocate to contributing to government reports.

Politicians love Big companies. Look at the last EU's Draghi report, not a single small/medium company in the list of contributors.

by zoobab 2y ago

Politicians love Big companies. Look at the last EU's Draghi report, not a single small/medium company in the list of contributors.

paganel 2y ago

Too bad that European history is filled with former autocrats/dictators who had gotten into power especially on the back of disgruntled small/medium business owners, the Nazis themselves had in their programme at some point the dismantling of big (and Jewish-owned) general stores so that the small store owners could have a chance (that didn't happen once they got into power, they just took over ownership from the Jewish).

vvpan 2y ago

The guy who made Nomad List and a bunch of other websites said on twitter that he was contacted by Draghi for the report.

WalterBright 2y ago

In the 90's, Microsoft proudly gave no money to politicians. Look what happened - an attack by the government on rather nebulous anti-trust charges. (Really - giving away a free browser harms consumers?) This all stopped when Microsoft learned that when you're a big company, you'd better pay tribute (political contributions). The winning strategy is to contribute to both sides.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
Yes giving a browser away harms consumers. It’s bundling and dumping to kill competitors.
- benoau 2y ago
  It’s also worth noting at that time downloading an alternative browser probably over “dial up” was likely to take a couple of hours when you also had usage quotas and fees based on connection duration!
  - gruez 2y ago
    Fact check: firefox 1.0 (released in 2004) was only 5MB [1], which takes only 15 minutes to download on a 54 kb/s dial up connection[2] [1] https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/1.0/win32/en-US/ https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/1.0/win32/en-US... [2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=6+MB+at+54kb%2Fs https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=6+MB+at+54kb%2Fs
    - benoau 2y ago
      That was the fastest a dial up modem could be, many modems were a fraction of that speed. And this was Netscape, not Firefox, you need to go back about ten years further. Edit: redoing the maths properly makes the 15 megabyte download in the late 90s take approximately: - 45 minutes at 56.6kb modem - 90 minutes at 28.8kb modem - 180 minutes at 14.4kb modem http://www.oldversion.com/windows/netscape/ http://www.oldversion.com/windows/netscape/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape > Microsoft released version 1.0 of Internet Explorer as a part of the Windows 95 Plus Pack add-on. According to former Spyglass developer Eric Sink, Internet Explorer was based not on NCSA Mosaic as commonly believed, but on a version of Mosaic developed at Spyglass[33] (which itself was based upon NCSA Mosaic). > This period of time would become known as the browser wars. Netscape Navigator was not free to the general public until January 1998,[34] while Internet Explorer and Internet Information Server have always been free or came bundled with an operating system and/or other applications. Meanwhile, Netscape faced increasing criticism for "featuritis" – putting a higher priority on adding new features than on making their products work properly. Netscape experienced its first bad quarter at the end of 1997 and underwent a large round of layoffs in January 1998.
      - gruez 2y ago
        >And this was Netscape, not Firefox, you need to go back about ten years further. Software tends to get bigger as time goes on, not smaller. Therefore the size of firefox in 2004 should be an upper bound for a browser back in the 90s.
        2y ago
- s_m_t 2y ago
  I don't get it are operating systems and computers supposed to ship without web browsers? You could argue literally any feature is put into a product to 'bundle and dump' to kill competitors. Why is a web browser something that should be a paid product with a so called competitive market to begin with? Windows also comes with USB drivers but hypothetically I could drive down to Best Buy and choose from a number of different USB drivers I would have to pay for separately (I guess I should pick up a web browser too apparently). This would be preferable why?
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    Exactly. The whole case was simply an attack on Microsoft because Microsoft was a big target that (stupidly) dissed the DoJ.
  - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    > I don't get it are operating systems and computers supposed to ship without web browsers? You could argue literally any feature is put into a product to 'bundle and dump' to kill competitors. A browser was a separate product at the time, not a feature. Microsoft bundled, as they have done many other times, for anticompetitive reasons.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      Cars today come bundled with stereos and navigators. Should they be charged?
      - chii 2y ago
        only if the big car manufacturer made their own stereos/nagivators, and refused to do business with other vendors of such components in order to lock them out of the market.
        WalterBright 2y ago
        Sounds like you think they should be charged.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  Consumers at the time had other browsers they could install and use. There was no impediment to it.
gruez 2y ago
>This all stopped when Microsoft learned that when you're a big company, you'd better pay tribute (political contributions). The winning strategy is to contribute to both sides. Source? It seems equally plausible that it stopped because Microsoft won on appeal and the government got spooked and didn't want to prosecute a losing case.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  > A losing case And there you go. There was a picture just before that of Bill Gates riding on a golf cart with Bill Clinton. And then the case was dropped. Things that make you go hmmmm....
labster 2y ago
It’s a good thing we only have two sides in America. Can you imagine if companies had to contribute to as many parties as Europeans have? No wonder we’re more competitive here.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  When you're big, it's a cost of doing business.
- em-bee 2y ago
  you only need to contribute to the winning parties
bantunes 2y ago
"Rather nebulous"? What's nebulous about leveraging your position on the market to drown out competitors with a free browser bundled with your operating system? If Amazon redirected all search results of a product to their own version of it, omitting all others - would that be nebulous as well?
- WalterBright 2y ago
  The real reason Netscape failed was their browser stunk. I know because I used both of them. Netscape crashed constantly. Explorer crashed too, but not nearly as often. That's why people switched to Explorer. Netscape ran crying to the government. That whole shtick about Explorer being uninstallable was ludicrous and irrelevant. Nothing stopped a user from installing another browser and using it. These days, a free browser is included with about every device.
  - bantunes 2y ago
    Non-technical users leave defaults on all the time - do you really think there wasn't a sense in some people IE _was_ the internet? Don't you think MS wanted it that way? The "Connect to the Internet" icon on Windows 98's desktop had the IE icon on it! And this wasn't "these days" when "a free browser is included with every device", it was 1998. I think you're being dense on purpose.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      Microsoft included a number of utilities with its operating system - like a text editor - that operating systems have included since the beginning. There's no magic line that says a browser cannot be included.
fragmede 2y ago
Yes, really. By using their profits from other areas to drive Netscape out of business, consumers were harmed. This was shown in trial and Microsoft found to have violated antitrust laws.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  No, nobody ever identified any "harm" at trial. I started out using Netscape (amazingly, it wasn't any trouble getting and installing). The "harm" I experienced was Netflix crashed constantly. So I tried Explorer. Explorer crashed about 90% less. That was the end of Netflix. The horrible, dirty deed Microsoft did was write a better browser.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    The harms identified in the trial were reduced consumer choice, stifled innovation, exclusionary tactics, predatory pricing, and monopoly maintenance.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      Except that none of those hold up under scrutiny.
      - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
        Right, because post these events software didn't devolve to 'free software' that only costs 'all your privacy and personal information' as that is the only funding method able to compete with 'free'.
  - piva00 2y ago
    > The horrible, dirty deed Microsoft did was write a better browser. No, the dirty deed was using their monopolist power to undercut another browser by bundling their offering with the OS. Please, Walter, your takes are getting a tad way overboard with the anti-regulation stuff, you are stopping to think rationally to become an ideologue. You are smarter than that, at least by your technical achievements you should be.
piva00 2y ago
> (Really - giving away a free browser harms consumers?) Really, it does, and you were alive and on the internet at the time. You saw the rise of webpages that would only work on IE because it was bundled, you saw the demise of Netscape as a competitor because people wouldn't go through the motions of downloading another browser on a 28.8/56kbps connection. Price dumping with extra steps is still price dumping.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  As I remarked, I used Netscape first. I abandoned it for Explorer because Netscape crashed all the time, to the point of being unusuable. Explorer was simply better.
  - chii 2y ago
    whether iexplorer was better or not doesn't have anything to do with it being a subject of monopoly practises.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      Of course it does. It is an explanation for why Explorer was preferred. Explorer was not forced on anybody.
- ThrowawayB7 2y ago
  All preventing that got us was a Chrome browser monopoly instead by a business whose overwhelmingly dominant source of revenue was internet advertising, oops. Talk about going from the frying pan into the fire. We'd probably have come out better off with the Internet Explorer monopoly.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    At least Chrome will work on many different OSes, and [Chromium] is open-source so it can be compiled for anything. The problem with IE was that it forced everyone to buy and use Windows. If they had made it free and open-source so people could use it on any platform they wanted, it would have been fine.

tormeh 2y ago

Small companies don't have spare people to allocate to contributing to government reports.