(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
Why College Rankings Are a Joke
The rankings nourish the myth that the richest, most selective colleges have some corner on superior education; don’t adequately recognize public institutions that prioritize access and affordability; and do insufficient justice to the particular virtues of individual campuses.
.. He said that he’d never trade his faculty position here for one elsewhere, though he has been wooed, because of U.M.B.C.’s almost unrivaled record for guiding African-American undergraduates toward doctorates and other postgraduate degrees in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math).
.. Diversity, socioeconomic or otherwise, doesn’t factor much into U.S. News rankings, though a broadening of perspectives lies at the heart of the best education. U.M.B.C., with its acceptance rate of nearly 60 percent, places 159th among national universities.
.. One of the main factors in a school’s rank is how highly officials at peer institutions and secondary-school guidance counselors esteem it. But they may not know it well. They’re going by its reputation, established in no small part by previous U.S. News evaluations. A lofty rank perpetuates itself.
Gladwell: On Rankings (Universities, etc)
Some years ago, similarly, a former chief justice of the Michigan supreme court, Thomas Brennan, sent a questionnaire to a hundred or so of his fellow-lawyers, asking them to rank a list of ten law schools in order of quality. “They included a good sample of the big names. Harvard. Yale. University of Michigan. And some lesser-known schools. John Marshall. Thomas Cooley,” Brennan wrote. “As I recall, they ranked Penn State’s law school right about in the middle of the pack. Maybe fifth among the ten schools listed. Of course, Penn State doesn’t have a law school.”
Those lawyers put Penn State in the middle of the pack, even though every fact they thought they knew about Penn State’s law school was an illusion, because in their minds Penn State is a middle-of-the-pack brand. (Penn State does have a law school today, by the way.)
.. My purpose is to prepare a map which shall show the distribution of those characteristics which are generally recognized as of the highest value. I mean by this the power of initiative, the capacity for formulating new ideas and for carrying them into effect, the power of self-control, high standards of honesty and morality, the power to lead and to control other races, the capacity for disseminating ideas, and other similar qualities which will readily suggest themselves.