Posts Tagged ‘commerce’
“Patents need inventors more than inventors need patents”*…
Patents for invention — temporary monopolies on the use of new technologies — are frequently cited as a key contributor to the British Industrial Revolution. But where did they come from? We typically talk about them as formal institutions, imposed from above by supposedly wise rulers. But their origins, or at least their introduction to England, tell a very different story…
How the 15th century city guilds of Italy paved the way for the creation of patents and intellectual property as we know it: “Age of Invention: The Origin of Patents.”
(Image above: source)
* Fun IP, Fundamentals of Intellectual Property
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As we ruminate on rights, we might recall that it was on this date in 1981 that IBM introduced the IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, the original version of the IBM PC compatible computer design… a relevant descriptor, as the IBM PC was based on open architecture, and third-party suppliers soon developed to provide peripheral devices, expansion cards, software, and ultimately, IBM compatible computers. While IBM has gone out of the PC business, it had a substantial influence on the market in standardizing a design for personal computers; “IBM compatible” became an important criterion for sales growth. Only Apple has been able to develop a significant share of the microcomputer market without compatibility with the IBM architecture (and what it has become).
“The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue”*…
Paywalls are justified, even though they are annoying. It costs money to produce good writing, to run a website, to license photographs. A lot of money, if you want quality. Asking people for a fee to access content is therefore very reasonable. You don’t expect to get a print subscription to the newspaper gratis, why would a website be different? I try not to grumble about having to pay for online content, because I run a magazine and I know how difficult it is to pay writers what they deserve.
But let us also notice something: the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New Republic, New York, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, and the London Times all have paywalls. Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the Washington Examiner, InfoWars: free! You want “Portland Protesters Burn Bibles, American Flags In The Streets,” “The Moral Case Against Mask Mandates And Other COVID Restrictions,” or an article suggesting the National Institutes of Health has admitted 5G phones cause coronavirus—they’re yours. You want the detailed Times reports on neo-Nazis infiltrating German institutions, the reasons contact tracing is failing in U.S. states, or the Trump administration’s undercutting of the USPS’s effectiveness—well, if you’ve clicked around the website a bit you’ll run straight into the paywall. This doesn’t mean the paywall shouldn’t be there. But it does mean that it costs time and money to access a lot of true and important information, while a lot of bullshit is completely free…
The political economy of bullshit– and thoughts on a remedy: “The Truth is Paywalled But the Lies are Free.”
On a related (and somewhat complicating) note, see also “It is possible to compete with the New York Times. Here’s how,” the source of the image above.
* Edward R. Murrow
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As we do like Diogenes, we might recall that it was on this date in 1974 that President Richard M. Nixon resigned, as a result of the Watergate scandal— which was itself, of course, in large measure the result of (expensive) investigatory journalism of the highest quality.
Nixon departing the White House after his resignation (source)
“Of course our lives are regulated. When you come to a stop sign, you stop; if you want to go fishing, you get a license; if you want to shoot ducks, you can shoot only three ducks. The alternative is dead bodies at the intersection, no fish, and no ducks. OK?”*…
After a characteristically-clear explanation of the ways in which the “monopoly practice” concerns around Google, Amazon, and the other on-line giants are different from those the U.S. has traditionally tried to manage– they limit/manage choice– the ever-illuminating Tim O’Reilly argues for a fresh approach to anti-trust:
So how are we therefore best to decide if these Big Tech platforms need to be regulated?
In one famous exchange, Bill Gates, the founder and former CEO of Microsoft, told Chamath Palihapitiya, the one-time head of the Facebook platform:
“This isn’t a platform. A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.”
Given this understanding of the role of a platform, regulators should be looking to measure whether companies like Amazon or Google are continuing to provide opportunity for their ecosystem of suppliers, or if they’re increasing their own returns at the expense of that ecosystem.
Rather than just asking whether consumers benefit in the short term from the companies’ actions, regulators should be looking at the long-term health of the marketplace of suppliers—they are the real source of that consumer benefit, not the platforms alone. Have Amazon, Apple, or Google
earned
their profits, or are they coming from monopolistic rents?
How might we know whether a company operating an algorithmically managed marketplace is extracting rents rather than simply taking a reasonable cut for the services it provides? The first sign may not be that it is raising prices for consumers, but that it is taking a larger percentage from its suppliers, or competing unfairly with them.
Before antitrust authorities look to remedies like breaking up these companies, a good first step would be to require disclosure of information about the growth and health of the supply side of their marketplaces. The statistics about the growth of its third-party marketplace that Bezos trumpeted in his shareholder letter tell only half the story. The questions to ask are who profits, by how much, and how that allocation of rewards is changing over time…
Data is the currency of these companies. It should also be the currency of those looking to regulate them. You cannot regulate what you don’t understand. The algorithms that these companies use may be defended as trade secrets, but their outcomes should be open to inspection.
An important read: “Antitrust regulators are using the wrong tools to break up Big Tech.”
* Molly Ivins
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As we bust trusts, we might recall that it was on this date in 1974 that the Supreme Court handed down its unanimous decision in United States v. Nixon, ordering him to deliver tape recordings and other subpoenaed materials to a federal district court. Special prosecutor Leon Jaworski had subpoenaed the tapes as part of on-going impeachment proceedings; the White House had sued to quash; and the decision is widely viewed as a crucial precedent limiting the power of any U.S. president to claim executive privilege.
“The map? I will first make it.”*…
Nautical map of the world by Nicolo di Caverio, 1506
From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, European powers sent voyagers to lands farther and farther away from the continent in an expansionist period we now call the Age of Exploration. These journeys were propelled by religious fervor and fierce colonial sentiment—and an overall desire for new trade routes. They would not have been possible without the rise of modern cartography. While geographically accurate maps had existed before, the Age of Exploration saw the emergence of a sustained tradition of topographic surveying. Maps were being made specifically to guide travelers. Technology progressed quickly through the centuries, helping explorers and traders find their way to new imperial outposts—at least sometimes. On other occasions, hiccups in cartographic reasoning led their users even farther astray…
How cartography made early modern global trade possible: “First you make the maps.”
* Voss
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As we find our way, we might recall that it was on this date in 1578– the same day that King Henry III laid the first stone of the Pont Neuf (“New Bridge”), the oldest remaining bridge in Paris– that the Catacombs of Rome were (re-)discovered. Underground burial sites in use mostly in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, they were decorated with both iconographic and stylistic paintings and mosaics. After their rediscovery, it took several decades to explore and map them; indeed, new discoveries have been made as recently as the 1950s.
Eucharistic fresco in the Catacombs [source]
“We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary”*…
In the early history of international trade, when exotic goods traveled to new regions, their native names sometimes hitchhiked along with them.
Naturally, the Germans have a term – Wanderwörter – for these extraordinary loanwords that journey around the globe, mutating subtly along the way…
See the map above in larger format, and learn more about each of the examples it illustrates at: “Mapping the Spread of Words Along Trade Routes.” [sourced from Lapham’s Quarterly]
* James Nicoll
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As we ponder the provenance of our produce, we might recall that it was on this date 1397 that Geoffrey Chaucer “told” The Canterbury Tales for the first time at the court of Richard II.
A woodcut from William Caxton‘s second edition of The Canterbury Tales, printed in 1483
