Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard hits a bump as FTC seeks to block it

Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualBut I don't see Microsoft making any big moves on the PC market until years down the line.

I'm not sure I find "we wouldn't be the first victims" all that reassuring.

Hey, someone had to argue for the other side. I tend to agree with this, but my argument is that monopolies are not bad for customers as a whole. Windows and Xbox users would welcome this change because it makes their lives more convenient, with more value for their money. In actual fact, it turns out that monopolies tend to have positive impacts on a business's customers. It's competitors and their customers (or in this case, free software users) that it tends to affect negatively.

Monopolies have produced some great things. Take AT&T and Bell Labs, perhaps the most prolific monopoly in history, which resulted in UNIX, something that continues to have a ricocheting effect on operating systems today.

I don't find that argument very convincing for monopolies in general. AT&T was a kind of monopoly we don't see nowadays: a very highly regulated monopoly with profits limited by law. Those can have positive effects, particularly if, like AT&T, they're so-called "natural monopolies". Bell Labs became a thing because AT&T was able to make far more money than it was allowed to have exist as "profit", so they had to find something to do with it. Although, AT&T had its downsides as well. But if you're going to allow a "natural monopoly" to exist, largely because duplication of infrastructure is inefficient, then it's probably easier and less prone to abuse to just make it public than to try to regulate it effectively enough to stop it from abusing its power.

In general, though, near monopolies only fail to abuse their customers if they are in the process of trying to achieve the real thing. Once they've got a lock, they jack up the prices, slough off the service, and stop innovating. Monopolies do not tend to have positive impacts on a business' customers. It may happen now and then, but it is far from typical, and any positive impacts from structural factors will tend to be swamped by negative impacts, certainly if the monopoly is at all solid. And Microsoft certainly is no exception; Linux and Apple are probably the only reasons Windows doesn't suck far more than it does.

Quoting: Comandante ÑoñardoFinally, a sample of common sense!

Dont go that far nobody has stepped in yet to stop thq nordic from buying deep silver and whole slew of smaller studios and publishers including codemasters. Ms has the money for the ftc to go okay thanks for new office we have decided nothing to see here. Given MS has an exclusive relationship with EA now in terms of EA games as a service gets bundled with game pass having actvivision as well gives them a whole raft of gaming exclusive series if thats how they chose to take it thankfully a pc gamer so i get all their games regardless but it would suck if i was a console gamer.

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualBut I don't see Microsoft making any big moves on the PC market until years down the line.

I'm not sure I find "we wouldn't be the first victims" all that reassuring.

Hey, someone had to argue for the other side. I tend to agree with this, but my argument is that monopolies are not bad for customers as a whole. Windows and Xbox users would welcome this change because it makes their lives more convenient, with more value for their money. In actual fact, it turns out that monopolies tend to have positive impacts on a business's customers. It's competitors and their customers (or in this case, free software users) that it tends to affect negatively.

Monopolies have produced some great things. Take AT&T and Bell Labs, perhaps the most prolific monopoly in history, which resulted in UNIX, something that continues to have a ricocheting effect on operating systems today.

I don't find that argument very convincing for monopolies in general. AT&T was a kind of monopoly we don't see nowadays: a very highly regulated monopoly with profits limited by law. Those can have positive effects, particularly if, like AT&T, they're so-called "natural monopolies". Bell Labs became a thing because AT&T was able to make far more money than it was allowed to have exist as "profit", so they had to find something to do with it. Although, AT&T had its downsides as well. But if you're going to allow a "natural monopoly" to exist, largely because duplication of infrastructure is inefficient, then it's probably easier and less prone to abuse to just make it public than to try to regulate it effectively enough to stop it from abusing its power.

In general, though, near monopolies only fail to abuse their customers if they are in the process of trying to achieve the real thing. Once they've got a lock, they jack up the prices, slough off the service, and stop innovating. Monopolies do not tend to have positive impacts on a business' customers. It may happen now and then, but it is far from typical, and any positive impacts from structural factors will tend to be swamped by negative impacts, certainly if the monopoly is at all solid. And Microsoft certainly is no exception; Linux and Apple are probably the only reasons Windows doesn't suck far more than it does.

I'll concede that I was wrong to say that "monopolies tend tend to have positive impacts on a business's customers". I should not have implied that, in general, monopolies tend to do more good than they do bad. Good points on AT&T. I agree that, in the long-term, Microsoft's power over the industry would be bad for their customers. However, I don't think that monopolies are bad in every situation. Counter-point: streaming.

While I don't do much streaming myself, I've heard a lot of complaints from people saying that it's so much harder now that every company has its own streaming service, each with its own ever-shrinking pool of shows. When it was just Netflix, costs were far lower, and you got access to far more shows. Now, everyone has pulled their shows off Netflix, Netflix has raised their prices significantly, is trying to integrate draconian monitoring software from Adobe to ensure viewers can't share their logins with people in another house, and in general produces worse original shows. This is because there is a lot more competition now. Back when Netflix had a near-monopoly on the streaming industry, customers paid less, got more shows, and could share their logins with friends. And because of how successful Netflix was, they could attract better talent to produce better originals.

Let's take another example from the anime sphere (in the west, at least) that has gone in the opposite direction. Just two years ago, we used to have Crunchyroll, HiDive, Funimation, and AnimeLab. Each of these companies streamed a mostly-different pool of anime because they tended to deal in exclusive licenses. Many hate HiDive because it's just another streaming platform they have to subscribe to if they want to watch a particular show, even if they have some of the best features in the industry. Now, AnimeLab, Crunchyroll, and Funimation have consolidated into one company. While Crunchyroll has stopped their free tier and slightly increased their prices, this is far better for customers because they get many more shows for a similar amount of money all in one place, save for the occasional shows that HiDive and Netflix 'take hostage'.

Why is all of this an issue, you might ask? Because of a 'creative' monopoly called 'copyright'. When you create a work, you have an exclusive right to commercial exploitation of that work, and streaming companies generally negotiate an exclusive license with the copyright holder to stream that work. Now, you could argue that if the government didn't allow the copyright holder to sell exclusive licenses, this wouldn't be an issue, but that's also not true. If we did that, the environment would greatly favour Disney, because they produce and own much more content than any other one company, and why the hell should they put themselves in a worse position by selling licenses to use their own work to Netflix?

So, the crux of this issue is that copyright exists as a monopoly. Naturally, this argument applies to patents as well. So given that, I'm curious what you think the normal state of affairs should be to improve the situation for customers—should copyright be abolished, or drastically shortened from the death of the author + 75 years? Or is this a scenario in which you would prefer to preserve this 'creative' monopoly and have one company (perhaps government-owned), like Netflix, stream all media? I believe that the copyright period should be a little shorter than what it was before 1926, and that all copyrights should be registered.

(I initially considered including this in my last comment but thought it was quite long already, because this situation is why I believe what I do about monopolies)

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualEdit: And if you're familiar with the fable of Microsoft v Netscape, there's a monopoly that ended well for customers everywhere. Thanks to Microsoft, they standardized the idea of browsers everywhere being free-of-charge, which forced Netscape to pivot into Mozilla, which resulted in a great free software browser (that was also free-of-charge) that subsequently took market share from Internet Explorer because it was a better browser that supported open standards (some of which it had invented itself, like JavaScript) better than the competition.

If Netscape won, what would the world look like? Microsoft would have had to charge for Internet Explorer instead of bundling it with Windows 95 and future editions. Netscape wouldn't have been forced to innovate. Mozilla Firefox wouldn't exist, nor would any of Mozilla's other great free software programs.

The IE monopoly had zero to do with if a browser should be free or not, browsers had been free to download and use for some years before Microsoft decided to bundle IE with Windows and thus using their monopoly on the OS to gain leverage in the browser market. Nor was "give anyone a free browser" the aim of Microsoft, their goal was to shift enterprises to use their web server ISS instead of the Netscape Web Server (and in the end they both lost out to Apache anyway).

The problem was never that MS developed IE or that they released it for free, it was all about them abusing their monopoly. Fully agree that we probably in the end got it better with Firefox than if Netscape Navigator had survived (although we will never know since we don't have access to that parallel universe) but that is a "despite of" and not "thanks to" the market abuse by MS.

Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: pleasereadthemanual

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualBut I don't see Microsoft making any big moves on the PC market until years down the line.

I'm not sure I find "we wouldn't be the first victims" all that reassuring.

Hey, someone had to argue for the other side. I tend to agree with this, but my argument is that monopolies are not bad for customers as a whole. Windows and Xbox users would welcome this change because it makes their lives more convenient, with more value for their money. In actual fact, it turns out that monopolies tend to have positive impacts on a business's customers. It's competitors and their customers (or in this case, free software users) that it tends to affect negatively.

Monopolies have produced some great things. Take AT&T and Bell Labs, perhaps the most prolific monopoly in history, which resulted in UNIX, something that continues to have a ricocheting effect on operating systems today.

I don't find that argument very convincing for monopolies in general. AT&T was a kind of monopoly we don't see nowadays: a very highly regulated monopoly with profits limited by law. Those can have positive effects, particularly if, like AT&T, they're so-called "natural monopolies". Bell Labs became a thing because AT&T was able to make far more money than it was allowed to have exist as "profit", so they had to find something to do with it. Although, AT&T had its downsides as well. But if you're going to allow a "natural monopoly" to exist, largely because duplication of infrastructure is inefficient, then it's probably easier and less prone to abuse to just make it public than to try to regulate it effectively enough to stop it from abusing its power.

In general, though, near monopolies only fail to abuse their customers if they are in the process of trying to achieve the real thing. Once they've got a lock, they jack up the prices, slough off the service, and stop innovating. Monopolies do not tend to have positive impacts on a business' customers. It may happen now and then, but it is far from typical, and any positive impacts from structural factors will tend to be swamped by negative impacts, certainly if the monopoly is at all solid. And Microsoft certainly is no exception; Linux and Apple are probably the only reasons Windows doesn't suck far more than it does.

I'll concede that I was wrong to say that "monopolies tend tend to have positive impacts on a business's customers". I should not have implied that, in general, monopolies tend to do more good than they do bad. Good points on AT&T. I agree that, in the long-term, Microsoft's power over the industry would be bad for their customers. However, I don't think that monopolies are bad in every situation. Counter-point: streaming.

While I don't do much streaming myself, I've heard a lot of complaints from people saying that it's so much harder now that every company has its own streaming service, each with its own ever-shrinking pool of shows. When it was just Netflix, costs were far lower, and you got access to far more shows. Now, everyone has pulled their shows off Netflix, Netflix has raised their prices significantly, is trying to integrate draconian monitoring software from Adobe to ensure viewers can't share their logins with people in another house, and in general produces worse original shows. This is because there is a lot more competition now. Back when Netflix had a near-monopoly on the streaming industry, customers paid less, got more shows, and could share their logins with friends. And because of how successful Netflix was, they could attract better talent to produce better originals.

Let's take another example from the anime sphere (in the west, at least) that has gone in the opposite direction. Just two years ago, we used to have Crunchyroll, HiDive, Funimation, and AnimeLab. Each of these companies streamed a mostly-different pool of anime because they tended to deal in exclusive licenses. Many hate HiDive because it's just another streaming platform they have to subscribe to if they want to watch a particular show, even if they have some of the best features in the industry. Now, AnimeLab, Crunchyroll, and Funimation have consolidated into one company. While Crunchyroll has stopped their free tier and slightly increased their prices, this is far better for customers because they get many more shows for a similar amount of money all in one place, save for the occasional shows that HiDive and Netflix 'take hostage'.

Why is all of this an issue, you might ask? Because of a 'creative' monopoly called 'copyright'. When you create a work, you have an exclusive right to commercial exploitation of that work, and streaming companies generally negotiate an exclusive license with the copyright holder to stream that work. Now, you could argue that if the government didn't allow the copyright holder to sell exclusive licenses, this wouldn't be an issue, but that's also not true. If we did that, the environment would greatly favour Disney, because they produce and own much more content than any other one company, and why the hell should they put themselves in a worse position by selling licenses to use their own work to Netflix?

So, the crux of this issue is that copyright exists as a monopoly. Naturally, this argument applies to patents as well. So given that, I'm curious what you think the normal state of affairs should be to improve the situation for customers—should copyright be abolished, or drastically shortened from the death of the author + 75 years? Or is this a scenario in which you would prefer to preserve this 'creative' monopoly and have one company (perhaps government-owned), like Netflix, stream all media? I believe that the copyright period should be a little shorter than what it was before 1926, and that all copyrights should be registered.

(I initially considered including this in my last comment but thought it was quite long already, because this situation is why I believe what I do about monopolies)

You make some good points, and in these particular arenas I don't really disagree . . . I do think that if Netflix had managed to maintain its effective monopoly and create some serious barriers to entry so it could continue to do so with little fear of competition, the story would have gone a less positive direction in the end.

As to what I'd prefer to see . . . depends. There's what I'd really like to see, in a complete blue-sky kind of way, and then there's what might be practical as limited improvements on the current dispensation . . .

I have a better idea of the blue-sky thing. So: Federal governments set aside a pool of money for creators that's somewhat bigger than what they get now from all the companies they sell their works to. Maybe subdivide it into kinds of things, like movies vs books, maybe not, I can imagine arguments either way. Citizens of the country each get to dedicate an equal share of that pool to whatever artists they wish. Governments maintain a big "Kickstarter" style website where artists put up their stuff and the citizens get to direct their entertainment money. The pot gets split up based on the people who show up to have an opinion. Individual artists get money according to what was voted, except at the high end where you have massive votes there's a sort of soft cap of diminishing returns. In return, no copyright (except in the sense that things like misrepresenting someone's work either by pretending it is yours or pretending they wrote it differently from how they did would stay illegal) and all citizens get access to all the country's artistic production, for free. Ideally, countries sign treaties with each other for use of each other's creative output.

Creators get paid, a bunch of worthless middlemen do not, everyone gets all the stuff. But it couldn't happen without society being in the throes of a major transformation.

Quoting: Whitewolfe80

Quoting: Comandante ÑoñardoFinally, a sample of common sense!

Dont go that far nobody has stepped in yet to stop thq nordic from buying deep silver and whole slew of smaller studios and publishers including codemasters.

Where are those companies from?

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualCounter-point: streaming.

The early, more comprehensive, catalogue of Netflix wasn't because they'd cornered the market, it was because they were small. The rights holders just got free money for doing nothing. It was only when Netflix got bigger that those same rights holders worked out that they could get more money by rolling their own streaming service that had exclusive access to their content, or by playing the different streaming services against each other with exclusive contracts. The issue is the exclusivity - the monopoly. The music industry has compulsory licensing: people get to use your music and you get a royalty (whether the specific implementation is good or not is outside of the scope of it being a solution that exists). Video streaming will need similar, or at least regulation to prevent exclusivity, if video streaming services are to be able to compete. Far from being the solution - as you're arguing - monopoly is the problem.

Quoting: CatKillerThe issue is the exclusivity - the monopoly. The music industry has compulsory licensing: people get to use your music and you get a royalty (whether the specific implementation is good or not is outside of the scope of it being a solution that exists).

Because I've never been particularly interested in music, I know nothing about the industry, so it's good to hear another perspective that I never would have considered otherwise. Thank you for introducing me to a new tentacle of copyright law; I'm always looking to learn more.

QuoteVideo streaming will need similar, or at least regulation to prevent exclusivity, if video streaming services are to be able to compete.

I disagree that regulation to prevent exclusivity is all that's needed. As I argued in my previous comment, this would overwhelmingly favor Disney, who owns multitudes more content than any other one company. They don't have an exclusive license with the content creators; they are the content creators. Copyright by its very intention created and preserves this monopoly. I point this out because outlawing exclusive licenses alone would ease but not solve this issue because Disney has an unassailable advantage. The only way it could work is if, as you say, compulsory licensing was implemented.

QuoteFar from being the solution - as you're arguing - monopoly is the problem.

My position is that copyright and patents, which are `intellectual` monopolies, last far too long, and is mostly what has resulted in this unfavorable situation for customers. Because I doubt many people (least of all Disney share my extreme opinions about copyright and patents, I proposed a solution that further enforces this monopoly—one company, government-regulated or otherwise, controlling all media. As I saw it, without nullifying the intent of copyright (which many parties are heavily invested in protecting), this was the only real solution. I like the idea of compulsory licensing more now that it has been presented to me, and even though it contravenes copyright law, most people seem to accept it.

What I would really like to see is something similar for books.

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualI disagree that regulation to prevent exclusivity is all that's needed. As I argued in my previous comment, this would overwhelmingly favor Disney, who owns multitudes more content than any other one company. They don't have an exclusive license with the content creators; they are the content creators. Copyright by its very intention created and preserves this monopoly. I point this out because outlawing exclusive licenses alone would ease but not solve this issue because Disney has an unassailable advantage. The only way it could work is if, as you say, compulsory licensing was implemented.

This in turn raises the question: Should corporations actually be able to hold copyrights? It's not like "The Disney Corporation" ever wrote a song, after all.

Screw Micro$oft and their EEE politics, they are back to their old schemes.