"Nick Arnett" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Re: the local monopolies of newspapers
>It is essentially for the same reason that one operating system dominates
>desktops: as soon as one competitor pulls significantly into the lead, it
>has great economic advantages over newcomers.
Erm, well, I'd disagree with that and point back to the Network Effect, but
that's another discussion.
>To me, that clearly shows that our present conception of free markets as a
>reliable regulator and source of authority is incomplete and inefficient.
>What do we do?
There's a great quote I came across somewhere: "Average weather is a myth."
That is, weather is chaotic, and while you can point to an average over time
the fact is that unlike a nice bell curve, very few years will have "average
weather".
Okay, now my point: I think there's an expectation that we can somehow
devise a stable scheme or set of rules (like "free market", "socialism",
etc) which will keep humans generally happy. I think that's a "forward
myth".
What I would suspect (and/or hope for) is that a cycle will form in these
cases where the power of the monopoly is eroded over time. In the newspaper
example, the cost for production and distribution is eliminated by things
like the Internet. Sources become distributed and shared, and things like
aggregation (what used to require a human "editor") can be replaced by
automation.
That doesn't end things - it just pushes us into the next loop of the cycle.
Big news sites can stay in business but smaller ones evaporate due to the
razor thin margins. Only businesses of a sufficient size can generate income
when the cost of the product is infinitesimal. So the economies of scale
come into play again.
I don't know what the next cycle would be - perhaps eliminating the sites
and editorial power altogether and distributing filters or Napster-like
tools which pull content from various feeds and pay directly to the sources.
The tool - which is built around de-facto standards for transport and
formats - is free and the content is microbilled to the originator. The next
hump might be that content producers are forced to generate a tremendous
amount of content to stay liquid - mining things like newsgroups for trends,
blitzing events with microcameras, contracting people-on-the-street with
cameras, etc.
Is this chaotic cycle (assuming I'm not making up total BS) something that
happens as a consequence of the free market - thus, "if it ain't broke,
don't fix it", or is there some participation by what Brin identifies as a
"white blood cell" meme, where certain active members of society push for
altruistic directions?
Standards bodies like the W3C could be seen as big chunks of WBC activity
(hmmm, scarily similar acronyms). In a biological metaphor, they're enzymes
which help reactions get from one local minima to another; proprietary
conflicting standards to public interoperable standards. The benefits
require the ecosystem of a market to play in.
Just thoughts. :)
Joshua
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