Editorial: What Palm Should Have Done
Linked by Eugenia Loli on Fri 24th Jul 2009 22:52 UTC
Editorial Every few years we geeks have our own kind of popcorn show to watch: tech companies showing teeth to one another. This time around, it's Palm vs Apple. In all seriousness though, how ethical is the battle around iTunes?
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RE[3]: Monopoly?
by sbergman27 on Sun 26th Jul 2009 15:55 UTC in reply to "RE[2]: Monopoly?"
sbergman27
Member since:
2005-07-24

You seem to be making things up as you go along.

Specify. You make this assertion and then utterly fail to support it in the text which follows.

Not all barriers to entry are bad. I think laziness is a legitimate barrier to entry.

You're confused. Here's how it works. Barriers to entry are not intrinsically good or bad. As you note, providing a good product or service can be viewed as a barrier to entry. However, once you control a certain portion of the market, and it can be shown that barriers to entry exist in that market because of you, then you can and should be declared a monopoly. Now, monopolies, like barriers to entry, are not intrinsically good or bad in and of themselves. (Though I would venture to assert that it is not a good sign regarding the condition of free competition in that market.) However, with great power comes some added responsibilities and restrictions, because you, as a monopolist, can exert forces on the market which are qualitatively different than what would be exerted if a non-monopoly-holding player acted in exactly the same way. The monopolist may not like the extra restrictions. And naive observers may fail to grasp the qualitative nature of the difference between a monopoly and nonmonopoly player doing exactly the same thing in the same market.

But the prime mover is, and should be, the welfare of The People, in this case called the consumers. And that pretty much requires the legal mechanisms which we have in place to ensure that monopolists are constrained to act with the welfare of competition in their market in mind.

And I might note that your post seems to make up a few things that I supposedly "said" as it goes along. ;-) Or perhaps you simply misunderstood what I was saying. Hopefully this post clarifies things.

Edited 2009-07-26 16:02 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 2