The Wheel of Fate Has Turned

On Friday, March 12, the president of Microsoft testified before the antitrust subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives.

The panel is investigating the news business. Traditional newspapers are dying off, and they are being replaced by digitized news sources that seem few and overly powerful.

This was, indeed, the point Microsoft's Brad Smith was making. Google is the big bad monopolist. Nobody else can compete in the world of digital news because Google has blocked all the avenues for doing so. There oughta be a law!!!

The wheel of fate has turned. Not too many years ago, it was Microsoft that was the big bad monopolist, and the forces of government were needed, so we heard, in order to cut MS down to size. But the government lost those cases, and the markets did find a work-around.

Let's pause and contemplate the turn of the wheel. Back in the day when Microsoft was the defendant, these were the arguments: digital computers are a new thing, and network effects are of unprecedented importance in the life of this new thing. This means economies of scale are of unprecedented importance, the diseconomies of scale virtually disappear. That in turn means that monopolization is unprecedentedly easy and incurable by any means other than structural governmental re-wiring of the industry.

That argument failed in the courts, and MS stayed together. Yet amazingly the market did find work-arounds. And now we hear, against Google, and in part from MS, the argument that the 'cloud' is a new thing, that network effects are of unprecedented importance in the life of this new thing. And so forth.

And so it goes.

Comments

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog