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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday August 23 2017, @03:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the a-narrow-view dept.

Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker writes about the implications that technology monopolies have for culture by asking "Who owns the Internet?". Three decades ago, few used the Internet for much of anything and the web wasn't even around. Today, nearly everybody uses the web, and to a lesser extent, other parts of the Internet for just about everything. However, despite massive growth, the Web has narrowed very much: "Google now controls nearly ninety per cent of search advertising, Facebook almost eighty per cent of mobile social traffic, and Amazon about seventy-five per cent of e-book sales."


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  • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday August 23 2017, @06:20PM (7 children)

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Wednesday August 23 2017, @06:20PM (#558104) Journal

    I have no idea what you mean with "in the usual sense".

    Perhaps he means in an "anti-trust" or "legal" sense.

    From the Sherman Anti-Trust Act [justice.gov]

    The Sherman Act also makes it a crime to monopolize any part of interstate commerce. An unlawful monopoly exists when one firm controls the market for a product or service, and it has obtained that market power, not because its product or service is superior to others, but by suppressing competition with anticompetitive conduct.

    So there's some additional legal requirements to be an unlawful monopoly.

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by maxwell demon on Wednesday August 23 2017, @07:02PM (6 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday August 23 2017, @07:02PM (#558125) Journal

    Yes, there are additional legal requirements to make a monopoly unlawful. But the very fact that this additional adjective is added shows that there are monopolies that are not unlawful monopolies, as otherwise there would be no point in adding the explicit "unlawful". You don't speak of "unlawful murder" or "unlawful theft", you just say "murder" or "theft".

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday August 23 2017, @08:31PM (5 children)

      by DeathMonkey (1380) on Wednesday August 23 2017, @08:31PM (#558157) Journal

      I agree with you. And I think we're both agreeing with what the AC was trying (poorly) to say. Which is that all monopolies aren't necessarily bad.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @12:30AM (4 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @12:30AM (#558241)

        You say:

        Which is that all monopolies aren't necessarily bad.

        However, what you mean to say is something very different:

        Which is that not all monopolies are necessarily bad.

        or even better:

        Which is that not every monopoly is necessarily bad.

        or more precisely:

        Which is that it is not the case that every monopoly is necessarily bad.

        If the OP expressed himself badly, at least he didn't say something completely opposite to what he intended to say.

        • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday August 24 2017, @01:37AM (3 children)

          by DeathMonkey (1380) on Thursday August 24 2017, @01:37AM (#558270) Journal

          The wording may not be the best but it does parse properly:

          All monopolies are not bad.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @12:30PM (2 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @12:30PM (#558420)

            That is not what you mean to say. What you mean to say is this: "Not all monopolies are bad." How is it that you cannot perceive the difference?

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @01:12PM (1 child)

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @01:12PM (#558426)

              Because he is using the English language, which is not always logical. You are trying to map logic to the rules of the language, which fails here.

              "All X are not Y" would logically parse as ∀x∈X:¬Y(x), but according to the common usage of the English language it actually means ¬∀x∈X:Y(x). This is not unlike the fact that "I don't see no logic in it" would logically imply that whoever utters this does see logic in it (in logic, double negation cancels out), but actually means that the uttering person doesn't see logic in it.

              The English language is not really logical; learn to live with it.

              • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday August 25 2017, @01:29PM

                by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Friday August 25 2017, @01:29PM (#558847) Homepage
                Your knowledge of formal logic is infinitely better than your knowledge of English. The English meaning is the same as the logical one, and the alternative logic-defying interpretation is non-standard (a linguist's weasel words for "wrong, but some idiots use it, and apparently they're immune to reason, so we can't stop them").
                --
                Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves