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EU Plans To Make Apple, Adobe and Others Open Up
FlorianMueller writes "After pursuing Microsoft and Intel, European Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes is now preparing an initiative that could have an even greater impact on the IT industry: a European interoperability law that will affect not only companies found dominant in a market but all 'significant' players. In a recent interview, Mrs. Kroes mentioned Apple. Nokia, RIM and Adobe would be other examples. All significant market players would have to provide access to interfaces and data formats, with pricing constraints considered 'likely' by the commissioner. Her objective: 'Any kind of IT product should be able to communicate with any type of service in the future.' The process may take a few years, but key decisions on the substance of the bill may already be made later this year."
Government fucking with free markets is not as bad as a single company becoming too powerful and gaining the ability to fuck with the market...
If you can lock sufficient numbers of customers in to your proprietary products, such that it is unreasonably costly and/or damaging to switch away then the market is far from free. It is simply controlled by a large company instead of the government. Competition becomes extremely limited in such situations, competitors have an unfair burden of having to reverse engineer proprietary formats and protocols, and are always playing catch up to the market leader. The end result is that it's simply not commercially viable to compete with an entrenched player, so the competition either gives up or moves into niche markets.
It's like playing strategy games, once you're past a certain point your resources outstrip the opposition so badly that barring a colossal screwup on your part, your victory is inevitable.
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Everyone needs to eat, but demand for any particular set of food products is generally not inelastic - there's no cartel keeping people from substituting butter for margarine.
Actually, there historically was such a cartel. When margarine first came out, it was illegal in many states in the US to sell yellow colored margarine because dairy lobbies felt that yellow margarine looked too much like butter. Consequently, if you wanted yellow margarine, you had to buy a yellow coloring pack and mix it in.
Most of those restrictions were phased out or ignored after World War 2.