{"id":181075,"date":"2016-10-09T20:46:00","date_gmt":"2016-10-10T01:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/10\/09\/the-wonders-of-capitalism-and-competition\/"},"modified":"2016-10-09T20:46:00","modified_gmt":"2016-10-10T01:46:00","slug":"the-wonders-of-capitalism-and-competition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/10\/09\/the-wonders-of-capitalism-and-competition\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wonders of Capitalism and Competition"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Google has <a href=\"http:\/\/boingboing.net\/2016\/10\/02\/google-if-you-support-amazon.html\">decided to use the DMCA to lock out manufacturers who make hardware that is compatible with competing platforms from accessing Chromcast<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">A closed-door unveiling of the forthcoming Google Home smart speaker platform included the nakedly anticompetitive news that vendors whose products support Amazon&#8217;s Echo will be blocked from integrating with Google&#8217;s own, rival platform.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">These platforms are typically designed to allow their vendors to invoke Section 1201 of the DMCA, which makes it a felony to change their configurations in unauthorized ways, meaning that Google could convert its commercial preference (&#8220;devices either support Google Home or Amazon Echo, but not both&#8221;) into a legal right (&#8220;we can use the courts and the police to punish people who make products that let you expand your device&#8217;s range of features to support whichever platform you choose to use&#8221;).<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is our modern economy:  The free market has been supplanted by parasitic rent seeking.<\/p>\n<p>The DMCA is merely one example of this.  It permeates our economy.<\/p>\n<p>We see it in our IP regulations, our finance system, and our so-called &#8220;free trade&#8221; deals.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s money for nothing, and these rents are redirected toward our political process to buy more direct and indirect subsidies.<\/p>\n<p>The only question is how it ends:&nbsp; with an outbreak of sanity, or madame la guillotine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Google has decided to use the DMCA to lock out manufacturers who make hardware that is compatible with competing platforms from accessing Chromcast: A closed-door unveiling of the forthcoming Google Home smart speaker platform included the nakedly anticompetitive news that vendors whose products support Amazon&#8217;s Echo will be blocked from integrating with Google&#8217;s own, rival &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[775,767,761,766,913,869,917,826],"class_list":["post-181075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-business","tag-computer","tag-corruption","tag-evil","tag-ip","tag-legislation","tag-software","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181075"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181075\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}