Don't underestimate standardization or the difficulty imposed by everyone speaking a different language. The "Tower of Babel" failed because everyone started speaking different languages.
Not many people from the U.S. go to school for technology, since they don't see much opportunity to make money in that. So something is obviously holding us back. The lack of innovation is a consequence of the lack of people working in those fields. Monopolies would rather not hire people to do research though, since each person is a risk of information leakage and loss of market dominance. Thus, there should be a sales tax on products that are produced using proprietary information, and the money should be used to fund competing research for the public domain that is commercializable. That will give the dominant companies motivation to innovate, or at least move technology forward due to all the public domain development.
Monopolies provide great efficiencies for society, once the technologies have been developed. But once market dominance is achieved, it isn't as cost effective to develop new technology as it is to hinder all competition. Thus, to make a longer story shorter, I'm pretty sure there should be a tax on initial sales of products containing any bit of proprietary information (unless it's government-classified technology). The tax should probably be ramped up to a level of around 30-40%, and the proceeds should be used to fund public domain research that is free to commercialize (not GPL-licensed) to compete with the proprietary product that was taxed. Things are upside-down, with most people employed to develop private rather than public technology. The monopolies can make due with even fewer private-technology researchers, because each one is a risk to proprietary information leakage, anyway. Publicly funded public domain research would greatly increase utilization of the workforce, and it would be great for healthcare research!
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Don't underestimate standardization or the difficulty imposed by everyone speaking a different language. The "Tower of Babel" failed because everyone started speaking different languages.
Not many people from the U.S. go to school for technology, since they don't see much opportunity to make money in that. So something is obviously holding us back. The lack of innovation is a consequence of the lack of people working in those fields. Monopolies would rather not hire people to do research though, since each person is a risk of information leakage and loss of market dominance. Thus, there should be a sales tax on products that are produced using proprietary information, and the money should be used to fund competing research for the public domain that is commercializable. That will give the dominant companies motivation to innovate, or at least move technology forward due to all the public domain development.
Monopolies provide great efficiencies for society, once the technologies have been developed. But once market dominance is achieved, it isn't as cost effective to develop new technology as it is to hinder all competition. Thus, to make a longer story shorter, I'm pretty sure there should be a tax on initial sales of products containing any bit of proprietary information (unless it's government-classified technology). The tax should probably be ramped up to a level of around 30-40%, and the proceeds should be used to fund public domain research that is free to commercialize (not GPL-licensed) to compete with the proprietary product that was taxed. Things are upside-down, with most people employed to develop private rather than public technology. The monopolies can make due with even fewer private-technology researchers, because each one is a risk to proprietary information leakage, anyway. Publicly funded public domain research would greatly increase utilization of the workforce, and it would be great for healthcare research!