Is the concept of internet itself is anti free market?

Is the concept of internet itself is anti free market?

If they can and want to implement control over content, obviously they also will have moral and social responsibility about what will circulate over the web.
So not only fast lane or slow lane, they now have to make an white list.
But also, ISP could make their own contents and put it on fast lane, can ban or put in slow lane other sites... Or even buy it to be their site.

But wait, we saw something similar before: CONSOLE MARKET.
Console market have only Microsoft, Playstation and Nintendo.
They have exclusives and some multiplatform.
They have nintendo where most of games is exclusives.
They also self regulate their contents via ESRB and Cero.
And all of this is next to no govern interference except with the mortal kombat shit and 2017 or 2018 with the lootbox shit.

So that's why I ask....Is the concept of internet itself is anti free market, anti capitalist?

Coorporatism != capitalism.

I don't know whether to send you back to /r/the_donald or /r/games

Either way, fuck off kid

I'm a PC master race.
I do not like to see it becoming like console market with users waging ISP wars over which ISP should be the only ISP.

Net neutrality for me is forced cross play by law, something we need.

The Internet wasn't a fucking market originally, and it was ruined by all those corporations.

This, nothing makes FB, Nintendo, etc more privileged then any other nobody with a server. He'll, FB does a ton of open source work. The tech is open, the power comes from control over users and lock in.

Not just lock in from network effects (All your friends play on PSN, or the Artists are on Instagram) but lock in due to harmful addiction. Why are chronological feeds going the way of the dino? Because you can't personalize them. We custom tailor content to maximize ad exposure, the method flat out addiction.

Launch YouTube for a 30second video and you're bombarded with content you're weak to. Not shit you're interested in that is useful but whatever's going to sit you there. Everyone's using ML to target some metric, and that metric is revenue.

Why did FB push messenger so hard? Detailed analysis of consumer habits through their messages. Don't miss out on your group chat the boys are in! On mobile? Fuck you, install the app. Do I message you via SMS or FB, it's hard to tell with these bubbles looking the same.

The reason they have control is we are locked in via fucking addiction, the static content of the old web can't compete.

>Is the concept of internet itself is anti free market?

>So that's why I ask....Is the concept of internet itself is anti free market, anti capitalist?

This is actually two separate questions, and I think it's useful to distinguish between them.

"Capitalism" was a term that had many meanings, but it was Marx who created its modern definition. It's a politico-economic system imposed by elites creating an ownership class that gives itself divine right over the means of production (capital equipment). They use this notion of "private property" to disguise the class distinction between owners (capitalists) and the working class, especially managers who see themselves as upper class but are really just well-rewarded tools of the owners. Owners create no value for themselves, but instead harvest it like feudal lords based on their claim of ownership from workers who make use of the means of production (factories, land). There's some sense of class mobility, but then again there was in feudalism as well, and it's mostly symbolic so workers don't realize that they're still mostly heredity serfs. It's exploitation under more generous terms than feudalism, but still the same basic system with more worker-friendly rhetorical trappings.

That's the marxist view, which I've tried to explain in their own terms as fairly to their views as possible.

I'll do "free markets" next, and then explain why the distinction is important.

"Free markets" are what happen naturally when property rights are respected and they are not subjected to outside coercion (mostly this comes from governments and criminals). Just as Marxism considers itself a science of history, the science of microeconomics is the study of free markets and the effects of individual choice in cases where individual liberty is infringed upon (black markets, inefficiencies, corruption, etc).

The laws of microeconomics are positivist-- they're descriptions of what happens given a very small number of very broadly applicable assumptions. There's no intrinsic assumption that free markets are better or worse than a coercive system... but that is a finding* of microeconomic science that goes back to Adam Smith and has held up empirically ever since.

* Defining terms here: "better" can mean many things. Usually a free marketer would say it includes extracting maximum benefit out of available resources (including capital equipment, infrastructure, information/tech, and human labor/innovation/decision-making), then distributing those benefits based on each individuals' contribution to overall productivity. So there's an overall production benefit, a social justice benefit (different kind of justice than an SJW's version of the term!), and by moving resources towards those who increase productivity, as time goes on, the growth in available resources and benefits is maximized so there's more for everyone.

BTW, a marxist would reply to the above and point out that my definition of "better" is "capitalist" in itself-- designed by owners to deceive workers about their station. A marxist would reply that social/economic equality is more important than individual performance. Every individual poor person under capitalism might have more choices and a better standard of living, but *collectively* they're oppressed and unequal, and that oppression and inequality are evils in themselves.

As sciences go, microeconomics does a pretty good job of holding up to the scientific method. Marxism does not. Marxists have numerous explanations for why their theoretical model so far lacks predictive power in specific cases; some of these are pretty convincing after-the-fact interpretations of why marxism CORRECTLY APPLIED would have had predictive power in specific instances.

Karl Popper (the philosopher who invented the modern scientific method) was a socialist who grew disillusioned in the 1910's when he realized that history wasn't working out as predicted. His friends reacted by ret-conning the predictions. He invented falsificationism when he asked himself, "Under what conditions would my friends decide that marxism is just plain incorrect?" And that's why in your physical sciences classes you have Null and Alternative hypotheses. Popper didn't become a free marketer, btw, he just became non-political and focused on grad school and later his academic work.

However, as persuasion goes, you can't dismiss an ideology that, to one degree or another, is embraced by the vast majority of people on the planet. North Korea/Cuba/Venezuela have one version of it, China/India/Mexico have another, Europe and to some extent the USA has a different one, and most other leaders use marxist logic when politicking, even if they don't call it marxism.

That was incredibly autistic. Pls never vote

I wont.
I'm not american nor in america in first place.
But when you america do shit, we get shit.

Considering we pay a ton of taxes to play world police for you guys, you can deal with it

Doesn't Apple get to choose and censor whatever content they want on their app store?

Don't they ban competing products and promote their own? (they banned an app that detected airpods location, they came out with their own)

WHy are they allowed to do such things but not ISP's?

Companies do this all the time.

>WHy are they allowed to do such things but not ISP's?
I have no argument against it.
Despite we will be fucked in the ass in process.

Oh, and I should mention that support of the free market as an ideology IS a thing, and goes back to Adam Smith as well. It's usually partitioned off from microeconomics, but obviously you have guys who are both scientists and advocates like Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell.

Free marketers often these days push the extrinsic benefits of allowing free markets to happen and minimizing coercion. In other words, they say free markets are best because they bake the biggest economic pie for nearly everyone, fairly reward those who contribute the most, and encourage growth that ensures more wealth for everyone as time goes on. There are also arguments that free markets have intrinsic benefits that would be worth it even if some other system was invented that worked better than free markets: that individual liberty is a good thing in itself, that coercion is morally and psychologically toxic to both the person being controlled and the victim of that control, and that systems with lawful coercion usually end up quickly infecting themselves with unlawful coercion (crime/corruption).

OK so now let's get back to OP's question.

So is the internet anti-capitalist, anti-free market, or both?

Well, let's stipulate right off that it started as ARPANET, a military/academic program. But its real growth came much, much later, when private individuals got access to it. That is, when control started to become decentralized. However, thanks to their anti-trust exemptions, the cable companies are consolidating control, and new small ISPs are having trouble emerging due to not being able to compete with the subsidies and exemptions handed to the big companies as part of the "increasing access to broadband" programs.

The internet is pro-capitalist in a marxist sense. To them, it's a tool for maintaining elite hegemony, and existing ISPs will abuse their power to control content (like Rockefeller used train routes to take control of the oil industry).

BUT...

BUT...

The internet is breaks marxism's assumptions as well. The "means of production" are a computer, a text editor, and a compiler. And your brain. All of which you own. In a marxist sense, everybody is a capitalist now, or very easily could become one. AirBnB makes everyone who owns a house an owner of revenue-generating physical capital. Uber and Lyft do the same for your car. Apples iTunes store and Amazon's self-publishing service do the same for content creators. 3d printing might soon do that for manufacturing, and CRISPR for biotech. So you could say that the number of exploiters is going up, but those people are workers as well as owners, so the whole theory is teetering because it was formed in an era of big factories and emerging mass production.

That's how ESR (huge libertarian free marketer) and RMS (huge marxist) can both advocate the same value of the internet and support the same free / open source movement for 180 degree opposite reasons. RMS wants to break the capitalist class. ESR sees this as free individuals collaborating for mutual benefit and increasing total wealth for everyone as a consequence.

A free marketer would complain about the laws that handed Comcast all this power to begin with, but also point out that A) preferential access to upstream bandwidth can help with internet traffic problems and enable new technologies, B) it's their networks and their right, C) that they have all this leverage due to government legal advantages that you'll notice nobody is talking about repealing, but most of all, D) there are lots of ISPs and no single ISP is The Internet, and if Comcast or someone else abuses their power, that's an opportunity for Google or AT&T or T-Mobile to jump in and poach their customers... and if they don't do it, then some new start-up will pop up that does and makes a mint selling non-preferential IP traffic.

And BTW remember that the throttling isn't of customers, it's of corporate internet providers like Netflix. They have leverage of their own, most of all that if Comcast gave them slower bandwidth, then AT&T would air commercials saying that their Netflix customer download speeds are faster and people would switch.

And let's not forget that these draconian abuses are entirely hypothetical, and were mostly hypothetical even when NN was first passed (not as a law, but as President Obama declaring it by decree because congress decided that it was a bad idea and didn't pass the law that was proposed). Passed... two years ago. Which is all we're going back in time.

Finally, and then I'm done, there's something called "regulatory capture". When you put the government in charge of micromanaging an industry, who do you hire as the regulators? Activists at first sometimes but soon it's all people who already worked in industry or plan to do so. You get a revolving door and the regulators work for the existing corporations passing rules that keep new competitors from coming in and protecting the company's profits.

Remember all those rules that keep Comcast exempt from the rules everyone else has to follow? That's what means by "corporatism" or "state capitalism" or whatever. Government waves the flag of Marx while using coercion to protect business elites. That's the worst of both worlds of marx and microeconomics, and so it's no surprise that that's how big regulatory solutions to problems that we don't have yet usually play out. THAT story isn't hypothetical-- it happens all the time.

I used to be pro-NN. I might be again if five years from now the repeal abuses the hell out of the internet, no new ISPs can enter, and I'm proven wrong. But IMO the solution will do more harm than the "problem", especially since we haven't actually had a problem with this yet.

>Is the concept of internet itself is anti free market?
No, it's a free market.

> If they can and want to implement control over content
Depends on who "they" is. An owner of a store or home has control over what their building contains, with only few limitations.

> But also, ISP could make their own contents and put it on fast lane
Yes. That would be a problem with the "freedom" of the market, now an infrastructure provider (rather than a site owner) limits what is easily accessible on OTHER sites.

The solution is for the government to simply prohibit infrastructure providers from doing more than provide infrastructure to all. They're in an unique position and need to be regulated.

>Doesn't Apple get to choose and censor whatever content they want on their app store?
Within set regulations, yes.
>Don't they ban competing products and promote their own?
Rarely.
>WHy are they allowed to do such things but not ISP's?
Because you can choose between Apple, Google, Microsoft, or Blackberry. In a majority of regions, you cannot choose between ISPs due to collusion, costs, and buyouts.

> Because you can choose between Apple, Google, Microsoft, or Blackberry.
Also, burgerland is not good at all at stopping even the most obvious offenders.

The EU fined >8bn Eur in the last ~4 years with (in overall spirit, not in various details or -obviously- administrative or court practice) fairly comparable laws.

Companies break competition rules all over the place if you let them do it like burgerland does, and they profit massively. If the government doesn't step in, you end up with a bunch of monopolies, duopolies, collusion...

That is correct. They are horribly inefficient in a lot of ways and never stop the issues before they grow into these huge behemoth problems. No wonder they have a bunch of people demanding some sort of total revolution.

However the problems can be fixed if they stopped trying to be utter retarded rebels and focused on putting proper regulation in place. We even have americans shitting on people like Warren for even suggesting the possibility that walmart execs take home less money and pay a little more in improving benefits. That's how far gone that nation is.

>but those people are workers as well as owners, so the whole theory is teetering because it was formed in an era of big factories and emerging mass production.
There's actually a interesting Marxist theory around this. They call it self-exploitation.
Consider: All businesses are immediately made into worker co-ops. Everyone owns their employer, they own the means of production. But what happens now? Well, we still have money, and you still have to go through the M > C > M' cycle to be safe. (i.e. your co-op invests some money to make commodities, which are then sold to make more money, and the cycle resets.) So despite the workers having de-jure control, market forces make them act essentially as a capitalist would - and what happens when the co-op has to pick between lay-offs and unprofitability?

>and if they don't do it, then some new start-up will pop up that does and makes a mint selling non-preferential IP traffic.
This is a rather optimistic assumption remembering the costs of doing so.
I mean, consider it with a railway line instead of fibre-optic tubes. In terms of just pure psychology, are you going to lay a railway line to compete with the present railway monopoly? I mean, just the mental picture of it is quite silly, re-inventing the wheel for little reason.
Of course, you can always compete laterally rather than directly (i.e. google could offer satellite internet or something instead.) but that has it's own quirks.

Also I'd note that your definition of free-market could perhaps be split, since you have a sort of divide between "If the market does form a monopoly, that's fine" (i.e. the "totally leave the market alone") way of thinking, and the "if a monopoly arises, it should be broken up to preserve a competitive market" people.
>Government waves the flag of Marx
This would seem an unreasonable reading of Marx, since he thought the state was an instrument of class-rule. Regulatory capture would be consistent with Marx.
good posts though.