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The Monopolies That Dominate the Internet
Tim Wu has a piece up at the Wall Street Journal pointing out that the free-market, open Internet — "competition in its purest form" — has evolved to be dominated by monopolies. Wu argues that this is nothing new, and that each wave of information technology in the US has followed a similar pattern. "Today's Internet borders will probably change eventually, especially as new markets appear. But it's hard to avoid the conclusion that we are living in an age of large information monopolies. Could it be that the free market on the Internet actually tends toward monopolies? Could it even be that demand, of all things, is actually winnowing the online free market — that Americans, so diverse and individualistic, actually love these monopolies? ... Info-monopolies tend to be good-to-great in the short term and bad-to-terrible in the long term."
irrelevant. even if there was no credit, in the long run all the assets would consolidate at the hands of more successful competitors. that is even assuming they started off equally, which is never the case.
read the post i linked down in the grandparent.
Read radical news here
The political innovation that made markets work so well is to counterbalance them with democracy, where the guiding principle is "one person one vote" (i.e. votes can't be traded away - the opposite of markets).
Mass media broke this. The parent companies of five movie studios control U.S. television news, which in turn controls the general public's awareness of issues and of candidates. Notice that TV news hasn't covered ACTA or other issues where the public could stand to gain at the expense of the MPAA or vice versa.
Governments are associated with monopolies when market forces overcome democratic forces within the government.
This has in fact happened. U.S. voters by and large do what the TV tells them.