(32 min) Before, the monopoly was in production, but now it is in ranking a huge supply.
Need a word for Power through Network Effects, even though there are alternatives
People would see and react if you were a monopoly that jacked up the price of oil, but if you are Google and Amazon, you could reduce someone’s ranking and only a minority will notice.
Antitrust was designed to deal with scarcity, but that makes current antitrust that deals with abundance worse.
(57 min) What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If Silicon Valley wants net neutrality, they should be open to regulation too.
This episode surprised us; through a discussion of who is at fault in the latest series of new vs old-world spats, we realized that not only has the Internet fundamentally changed winners-and-losers, but also the very nature of economic competition and the type of regulation that is required.
Topics & Links
- Mathew Ingram: Giants Behaving Badly – GigaOm
Google v MetaFilter
- Matt Haughey: On the Future of MetaFilter – Medium
Journalism v Facebook
- Mike Hudack: A Rant About the State of Media – Facebook
- Ben Thompson: Newspapers are Dead; Long Live Journalism – Stratechery
Amazon v Publishers
- Ben Thompson: Publishers’ Deal With the Devil – Stratechery
- George Packer: Cheap Words – New Yorker
Antitrust, Network Effects, and the Age of Abundance
Do Tech Companies Have a Responsibility to Society?
On how the Internet has fundamentally changed the world, and how government regulation is hopelessly behind