I've that this before, but I like my markets free as in GPL, not free as in BSD. That is, I want the markets themselves to be free, even if that means that participants in the market have limitations put on them to keep them from capturing the market, forming monopolies, etc.
It's the regulations / limitations you are proposing that make it possible/likely that a monopoly will form. See Milton Friedman on this. There's basically no example of a monopoly forming outside of government regulation.
That's because there's basically no example of advanced economies that are not regulated by government. It's not the regulation that makes monopolies happen, it is that regulations only exist in markets which could support monopolies.
> There’s basically no example of a monopoly forming outside of government regulation.
The monopoly on force which defines the state must first form before there can be any government regulation, and thus must inherently form outside of government regulation.
Once that forms, of course, there is virtually no example of anything in human society forming outside of government regulation.
But taking the absence of evidence of how things behave “outside of government regulation” for evidence of ones preferred view of the difference between life under government regulation and without it is rather unwarranted.
I think they mean government regulations providing protection from competitors specifically. Not just all possible govt protection that everyone gets including competitors, for example from being robbed or invaded by Russia or whatever.
> There's basically no example of a monopoly forming outside of government regulation.
That's tautological statement. There is no free market without private property protections which do not exist outside of government regulation either.
Some people view the protection of individual intrinsic rights (freedom from violence, protection of property, the right to move freely about) as a separate thing from regulation.
Government protecting people's rights, vs. government protecting people, or government prohibiting consensual business dealings.
I don't think so. It is notable that many monopolies sprung up in the US in the late 1800's/early 1900's before there was significant regulation, which is what in fact lead to the first significant laws related to monopolies and "trust busting".
There is certainly the danger of regulatory capture that increases the costs for competitor to enter a market, but that is different than regulations on how large corporations are allowed to wield their power as market leaders. You need to distinguish between regulations that increase the costs for new competitors vs. those that prevent bullying/price fixing etc. For example, it was anti-trust regulation that gave rise to popularity (not initial creation) of Unix, and interoperability regulations that further expanded competition in the telecom industry.
Does this example of a bad government regulation come from the government? Or the people voting and demanding it from the government?
No, it comes from business. DMCA is an example of the badness of private business if allowed to do what it wants.
That was a purchased law. The failure on the governments part was in allowing itself to be for sale.
So you are right, even though I bet this is just about the opposite of the conclusion you thought citing the DMCA resolves out to, we should definitely stop allowing the government to be influenced by the private sector.
Look, it's government power behind it. I don't fundamentally care how it's gotten rid of as long as it is. Weaken businesses, weaken the government, weaken the links between the two, whichever way is fastest/most effective- in principle. I just don't particularly trust your prescription, as you don't mine. This situation is, of course, exactly as the government-business complex wills it.
There are actually quite a lot of government regulations without which a search monopoly would be less likely, from the patents Google holds to the CFAA creating uncertainty for small competitors to do the scraping that would be necessary to get as comprehensive an index without being large enough to have sites request indexing to the GDPR increasing compliance costs to the RIAA/MPAA and news sites flinging lawsuits left and right based on overbroad copyright laws to the FCC rules that impair last mile competition that could result in higher upload speeds and thereby greater P2P content hosting which is more easily indexed by search competitors.
