Is it even possible for companies to strike exclusive deals when teams of nerds across the country have been at work on hacking the iPhone since it’s release in late June? Engadget declared the Apple/AT&T exclusivity deal dead at noon on Friday, so sorry if this story is a little old, but now that media outlets like Wired, BusinessWeek, and CNN are covering the story, I thought that TLF should also weigh in.
I don’t know if I should view this as good news, bad news, or just another lesson in the folly of trying to lock-out the tech set from something as desirable as the iPhone. Exclusivity deals, from a policy standpoint, are like most any other private, legal arrangement to me–they’re perfectly fine. However, the corporate managers of the world may want to start reconsidering exclusivity arrangements that rely on hack-proof tech. Why? Because no such thing exists.
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In July, I mentioned the interesting comparison chart that Verizon’s Link Hoewing put together comparing contracts, competition, coverage, prices, new services, and more in both the U.S. and European cellular markets.
If you’re interested in this subject, there’s a new report out by the American Consumer Institute entitled “Comparison of Structure, Conduct and Performance: U.S. versus Europe’s Wireless Markets.” The report finds that:
- The U.S. wireless market offers more choice and is less concentrated than any Western country’s wireless market;
- U.S. consumers use an average of 800 wireless minutes per month, while most European consumers use less that 200 minutes per month;
- U.S. wireless prices are the lowest in the world, with the exception of Hong Kong; and
- The combination of higher usage at lower prices presents compelling evidence that the overall consumer welfare derived from wireless service is higher in the U.S. than internationally.
“In summary, a comparison of international statistics suggests that the U.S. wireless market, in fact, leads its European counterparts, and the U.S. wireless market, compared to Europe, appears to be more competitive and vibrant. The contention that concentration leads to higher prices, lower usage and decreasing consumer welfare does not appear to be a U.S. problem, and furthermore, the contention that the U.S. lags the European market and needs some regulatory remedy is without empirical merit.”
Read the whole thing here.
PFF’s 2007 “Aspen Summit” featured some amazing panels and keynote addresses, and now they have all been posted online. Here are some of the highlights:
When more players enter the market for expressive works, an author faces both new competitors and new customers. What affect does that have on copyright’s power to stimulate authorship? Assume, both for the sake of simplicity and because it seems reasonable, that the ratio of authors/consumers holds steady. I posit that copyright will in that event offer greater rewards for authorship. Allow me to explain, here with a parable, and in a later post with some graphs.
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Read in the comments to Yglesias’s blog:
Going to popular/mass publication journalist-written books for an introduction to a country is a bit like taking Newtonian physics: it will get you some of the basic generalizations, but once you get more in depth you realize how wrong your introduction was.
I wonder if the person who wrote this actually took Newtonian physics. My understanding was that under most conditions people encounter in their day-to-day lives (i.e. you’re moving significantly slower than the speed of light and you’re larger than an electron and smaller than a black hole) Newtonian mechanics are quite accurate. I took several physics classes and I don’t remember the class where the professor said “OK class, that F=ma thing? We were lying about that.”
We’ve done a lot of writing about Internet gambling issues here at the TLF over the years. (Complete archives here). One of the things that always intrigues me about these debates is how passionate some policymakers can get about the supposed “evils” of private online gambling even though many of them support state-run lotteries.
What got me thinking about this again was an article in Sunday’s
Washington Post entitled, “Officials Laud D.C. Lottery as Success.” The D.C. Lottery turns 25 this week and, in the article, one local lawmaker after another celebrates the fact that more than $1.4 billion has been generated by the lottery for the city treasury. “Every time you buy a lottery ticket, the city wins,” says the current DC Lottery director. And former DC mayor Marion Barry, who currently serves as a DC council member, argues that, “Nobody makes anybody play the lottery… It’s a voluntary contribution to the D.C. treasury. It was a great vision.”
OK, so what’s wrong with people playing for their own enjoyment? Nobody makes anyone play private games of chance either. But because the money goes to private interests instead of the State, apparently it’s immoral and “evil.” Stupid.
When the Institute for Policy Innovation published a study purporting to show the harms of movie piracy to the United States economy, I wrote a post critiquing it that was unnecessarily vituperative. After further reflection, I posted a follow-up post apologizing for the tone of that post. IPI president Tom Giovanetti apparently didn’t find my apology adequate, because he sent letters to the president and several board members of the Show-Me Institute, where I was employed at the time, seeking to have me reprimanded. Thankfully, they didn’t consider my post to be a firing offense.
I’d like to avoid repeating that experience, so I’m going to be a lot more polite in my analysis of IPI’s latest study, this one on music piracy. Unfortunately, the new paper exhibits the same methodological defects as the previous study, and introduces some new problems as well. The gory details are below the fold.
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When economists draw graphs to describe monopolies, they typically represent both average revenue (i.e., price) and aggregate demand with a single line. Why? Because they assume that, by dint of revealed preference theory, sales of a good reveal the demand for it, and that a monopolist, by definition, alone satisfies the demand for a particular good. See figure one, below.
I question, though, whether that sort of graph does an adequate job of describing the sorts of monopolies protected by copyrights and patents. Because the law does not protect them perfectly, those sorts of “intellectual privilege” (the term I advocate in lieu of “intellectual property”) suffer unremunerated uses. Some such uses happen through infringement, such as street corner sales of pirated DVDs. Others happen by dint of special legislative exceptions, such as the unlicensed public performances of musical works allowed to certain small commercial retail establishments.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.