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Competition

Just because something isn’t a monopoly doesn’t mean all problems are solved. When the people are being beaten by a stick, they aren’t much happier if they can choose the stick from either Apple App Store or Google Play.

In a conversation about something else with a friend the other day he used the word “monopolistic” to describe our behated corporate overlords, and I’ve been rereading Bakuman which is a comic about comics creators competing with each other and I’m in an arch now where the editors are like “no wait we can’t read the other teams comics because that would be cheating” and I’m like... You’re all trying to make the magazine as a whole as good as it can be, right?

A corporate monopoly is dangerous and bad because of the network externality and of general problems with corporations including the main one: how they’re a strong force of decision-making and policy that’s out of control of the electorate, or the workers, or the consumers, or any human being at all since the board “needs to maximize shareholder potential”.

Part of why Debian is so awesome is that it’s being run as a democracy. (And if that’s not enough you can still fork, like people did over the systemd adoption for example.) Same goes for Wikipedia. A democracy but the data is still CC so worst case you can fork (or wrap, with some sorta dynamic rebasing scheme). Into it.

Network externalities