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from the no-price-does-not-mean-no-cost dept.
U.S. antitrust law is uniquely devoted to a strain of economics often called “price theory.” Beginning in the 1970s, price theory came to dominate antitrust law and scholarship.
Price theory (no surprise) focuses on prices. Supposedly, price theory uses price as a synechdoche to represent all aspects of competition. But in fact, businesses compete not just on price but also on quality, innovation, branding and other product attributes.
Yet U.S. antitrust regulators and courts have traditionally focused heavily on price competition. When products are “free” (or, more accurately, “zero-price”), they simply slip under the antitrust radar.
If the SCOTUS is willing to declare that money is speech, it should be no great leap to recognize that speech can also be money. Wall Street has clearly recognized the truth in that, giving multi-billion dollar valuations to companies that are entirely predicated on reselling their users' attention. How long until American courts catch up with reality?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Gravis on Sunday September 04 2016, @02:04AM
If these products are freely available, what room is there for antitrust, a body of law often understood as focused on protecting consumers from artificially high monopoly prices?
Who are they trying to protect if not the consumers from artificially high prices?
However, it should be noted that there is law that protects people from suppressed pricing which is called "dumping" [wikipedia.org] and yes there is legal recourse [wikipedia.org] to stop people from dumping.
Chances are that they have tried these routes and failed, possibly because there are multiple companies offering the same services for free as well as donation based organizations.
What we are really seeing here is a collision between the idea that you have to pay for services and the ability to make things free through automation and mass collaboration. I think we are going to see a lot more resistance to a post-scarcity society in the future as more advanced 3d printing technologies become inexpensive, like SLS and DMLS.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @03:45AM
SLS/DMLS is very energy intensive (laser plus heating the chamber), time intensive (machines working hour and days for what other do in seconds/minutes), and requires very fine dust of high quality (specially compared to plain plastic injection or metal foundry, where "big" blocks are ok), sometimes also special gases (to avoid reactions). Probably will never be cheap.
Post-scarcity sounds nice in scifi books... not very probable once science sets real limits. We may get there with population control and "needing" less in general (no "use and discard", "programmed obsolescence" to begin).
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday September 04 2016, @12:22PM
Post-scarcity sounds nice in scifi books... not very probable once science sets real limits. We may get there with population control and "needing" less in general (no "use and discard", "programmed obsolescence" to begin).
You know, I never thought of the environmental movement as, among other things, an anti-post-scarcity movement. But there is this obsession with halting or proscribing practices such as "use and discard" which take advantage of our plentiful resources and enormous, cheap manufacturing capacity, even when it doesn't make sense environmentally. Wasting peoples' time to save a little plastic is a typical environmentalist choice even though they're probably making the environment worse with this poor allocation of resources.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Sunday September 04 2016, @03:07PM
Actually, the problem with plastics is less in the production than the disposal. If we consistently recycled or burned (cleanly) the plastic after we were done with it it wouldn't be that big of an issue, but instead a large fraction of plastic trash it gets blown or washed away, where it becomes a major ecological hazard.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday September 04 2016, @03:32PM
If we consistently recycled or burned (cleanly) the plastic after we were done with it it wouldn't be that big of an issue, but instead a large fraction of plastic trash it gets blown or washed away, where it becomes a major ecological hazard.
Why would recycling or burning plastics help with litter? Keep in mind that most plastic in the environment didn't get there through landfills. It got there through improper disposal of trash or through loss of plastic goods into the environment (such as cargo washing off a container ship). Recycling or burning won't help with that.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday September 06 2016, @11:34PM
It wouldn't. Like I said *consistent* recycling would be needed, and eliminating littering would be a precondition. And I suppose if we managed to completely eliminate consumer littering, then landfills might be an adequate short-term solution.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday September 06 2016, @11:58PM
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday September 07 2016, @03:20PM
How exactly is most litter not improperly disposed of? That it's the consumer improperly disposing of the wrapper from another product is immaterial. Every plastic bag, cup, and styrofoam peanut drifting through the environment is a piece of plastic that was not properly disposed of. Most of it could be downcycled, and all of it could be burnt.
And yes, I've already conceded that landfills are an adequate short term solution *if* all plastic were properly disposed of.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 09 2016, @09:40PM
Most of it could be downcycled, and all of it could be burnt.
It won't be because it's in the environment, not in your recycling process loop. Litter and other environmental injections of plastic debris aren't caused nor solved by the choice between landfills and recycling.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday September 10 2016, @01:45AM
Which is kind of my point.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 10 2016, @09:31AM
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday September 11 2016, @03:54AM
I apologize for expressing myself poorly. You said
>But there is this obsession with halting or proscribing practices such as "use and discard" which take advantage of our plentiful resources and enormous, cheap manufacturing capacity, even when it doesn't make sense environmentally. Wasting peoples' time to save a little plastic is a typical environmentalist choice even though they're probably making the environment worse with this poor allocation of resources.
I intended to indicate that the primary problem with "use and discard" of plastic is not the consumption of resources, but the production of ecologically devastating waste. And that if we consistently recycled (or as you pointed out, sequestered) plastic effectively it would not really be a problem.
Unfortunately, given the nature of the kinds of things we like to produce with plastic, that seems unlikely to happen. Which means to restrict the damage, we must restrict the consumption. Or at least shift it into less damaging forms.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday September 11 2016, @08:11AM
Which means to restrict the damage, we must restrict the consumption. Or at least shift it into less damaging forms.
We still have the matter of whether it is better to do that or not. Restricting our use of plastic can cause damage in other ways. And the harm from environmental plastic is routinely exaggerated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 04 2016, @07:40AM
> What we are really seeing here is a collision between the idea that you have to pay for services and the ability to make things free through automation and mass collaboration.
No we aren't. We are paying for services with the currency of our privacy and of our time. This is not some post-scarcity business model, this is all about the scarcity of information about people and people's limited time to consume advertising.
That you don't recognize what the actual scarce commodities are here is a perfect illustration the myopia of the article talks about.