This is HN, the Church of the Free Market is well represented. If you haven't yet seen someone give the "free markets create competition" speech on Monday and the "my company aims to capture this space and then entrench a monopoly with economies of scale / network effects / platform effects / two sided markets / last mile dynamics" pitch on Tuesday, just hang around HN a bit more. You won't have to wait long.
A monopoly isn't a free market though, because, well, the market is not free. This ruling is precisely about making the market of payment processing on iOS more free, creating such a market.
Sure, we can say that it isn't true communism -- err, sorry, market freedom -- so long as we acknowledge that the incentives which create, establish, and perpetuate the monopolies emerge due to market freedom and attempts to curtail monopolies are regularly attacked under the banner of market freedom and that actual market freedom requires (metaphorical) mace-wielding regulators to regularly go on (metaphorical) skull-cracking expeditions which will be fought tooth and nail by investors seeking the windfall profits that come from monopoly.
Do we agree? Or will we find ourselves on opposite sides of this fight the millisecond the specifics of this case fade from the public eye?
I had thought the clear need for anti-trust had tickled down to the plebs on here. Unfortunate to see that people still casually refer to free markets as if it's a meaningful concept.
If you really truly think that regulation is dragging down some market, it's easy to talk about in specific terms. It is only possible to employ "free markets" in bad faith.
Yes, but temporarily embarrassed millionaires abound. They eagerly employ the concept of "free markets" in bad faith, propelled by the hope that the corruption can be made to work for them rather than against them. Some of them are right, most are wrong, but they are propelled to spread the faith just the same.
Beneath them, people tend to get good at programming before they get good at spotting exploitation, so there is always a stratum of True Believers to feed the operation. Individually they wise up and graduate, but the stratum remains as it is fed from the bottom by the proverbial sucker born every minute.
Then we have the top of the pyramid which actually does benefit from it all. They are small in number but they have enough money to fund the whole space (more importantly: enough money to have a reason to fund the whole space) so they have outsize influence. They could decide to ban me for saying this, for example.
Endstate of the game theory of free markets is cartel or Monopoly.
All it takes is a single competitor to gradually gain more and more strength and competitive advantage via dumping, regulatory capture, or other means (see: organized crime and syndicates) to win the death struggle.
What has saved us hasn't been some magical free market, it has been the markets themselves, once they achieve trust status, fundamentally undermined by science and technology creating a new market that upends the old one.
I highly recommend reading Schumpeter, both "Business Cycles" and "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy".
He discusses how motivations fundamentally change after profit margins peak and argues that profit after this point necessarily produces less economically efficient processes (in terms of the flow of demanded goods and services, not the shareholder, who does receive further productivity gains). In this context, undesired market advantage (legal or illegal) is just a symptom of profit, but it can be analyzed like any other sort of inefficiency. The core prescription is to nationalize the process or otherwise remove the profit motive around peak profit (which is, to be clear, not always easy or possible to identify... but in the worst case, this would open further opportunity for private capital to invest in the next generation of improvements).
He also discusses how failed investment cycles can resonate into market crashes faster than capital can rationally reallocate. Both of these above observations seem very very relevant to our current situation in the US today, and should cause everyone to look askance at people who aren't concerned about how healthy our political economy actually is.
> fundamentally undermined by science and technology creating a new market that upends the old one.
The kicker here is that there's no reason to expect either to continue yielding the same rewards. Some industries have projectable, plannable, investable growth patterns; others do not. Almost all the industries with predictable growth rely on consumption driven by yields from the lucrative exploitation of frontiers, mostly technological recently as you point out. I suspect that the market is going to get incredibly volatile as capital sees this frontiers dry up and adjusts expectations. ideally by cannibalizing itself and not eating us, but it might need a little help in that regard....
