❦ Billy Blaze ❦ is a user on mastodon.social. You can follow them or interact with them if you have an account anywhere in the fediverse.
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Early Marxists, including Lenin, tried to argue that monopolies were an inevitable economic outcome as companies merged into ever larger agglomerations. Undoubtedly this kind of effect does happen, but I don't think it's an inevitable outcome of any natural law. It happens due to distinctly chosen, and hence artificial, human-engineered laws and social arrangements.
In the modern context I don't think the internet monopolies which exist now were inevitable and things could have played out differently. The situation we're currently in is I expect a transient one in which the pendulum will swing back towards a more decentralized infrastructure.
In the modern context I don't think the internet monopolies which exist now were inevitable and things could have played out differently. The situation we're currently in is I expect a transient one in which the pendulum will swing back towards a more decentralized infrastructure.
@bob I think that the more common phenomenon is the emergence of oligopolies that reach a equilibrium of non-agression towards each other.
@bob This is probably the main reason all this 'intellectual property' - nonsense must die. No patents. No copyright beyond the author's life...
@ckeen I'd like to see copyright much shorter than the author's life (assuming average life span). If you can't make money on a copyright within ten years then it's unlikely to happen. After ten years, or some appropriately short time, works should become public domain.
@bob Agreed! I think if you take book authors then that time span is probably much shorter in reality. They get most out of hard-cover editions and it decreases with every reprint and soft-cover, supermarket chain edition etc. If they ever get that famous.
