Truth on the Market

Total horseshit: https://truthonthemarket.com/2019/08/27/7-things-netflixs-the-great-ha…

> which is obliged by law to work in the best interest if its shareholders That's a myth. There's no such law, at least not in simplistic understanding you are implying. E.g. see https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/10/why-the-maximizing-shareholder… https://truthonthemarket.com/2010/07/27/the-shareholder-wealth-maximiz… etc. > They can do whatever they want with their website. This is completely vacuous statement. Nobody says Google has no legal right to tweak their search algorithms for political reasons. The claim is that this is despicable and unwise thing to do, not that Google shouldn't have control of their own website.

That's true, but the shareholders have delegated the decision on how to spend the money to their legal representatives on the board. There's a strong presumption that the shareholders have elected board members whose decisions they support, so if the board makes decisions and the shareholders don't vote them out, those are presumed to express the preferences of the shareholders. Note that those decisions do not have to maximize shareholder profit. Shareholders can elect board members who commit to maximizing shareholder value, but they can also elect board members with a variety of other preferences and ideas about how to best run a company, or how to best spend its cash on hand. The board can legally pursue a wide range of strategies, and shareholder lawsuits basically never prevail (in the U.S.) absent some kind of overt wrongdoing, like secret side deals made by board members or something like that, or else shenanigans related to mergers and equity (e.g. some kinds of dilution). (There's a persistent myth to the contrary, but it's not really rooted in law; see e.g. http://truthonthemarket.com/2010/07/27/the-shareholder-wealth-maximiza… and http://hbr.org/2010/04/the-myth-of-shareholder-capitalism/ar/1 ... and even if that weren't true, courts are willing to grant considerable leeway to business strategies such as "building goodwill" and "increasing positive sentiment towards the brand", since courts aren't in a good position to second-guess a duly elected board…

> you wonder whether capitalism truly does produce the most efficient allocation of resources it does, but current state of capitalism has kinda degenerated. the main sentinel about this is the fact that us antitrust has not imposed any decent spinoff in the last 20-25 years. just to give you an example of proper activity of antitrust activity: IBM released the ibm pc as a farily open/standard platform in the 80ies because it had just got out of a multi-year, very serious and very expensive litigation with the DoJ. The litigation lasted 13 (!!!) years, from 1969 to 1982. See https://truthonthemarket.com/2020/02/03/the-ghosts-of-antitrust-past-p… if you want to know more. Think of what the DoJ should do to Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft (which had its own antitrust lawsuit... in the 90ies).

The government proved insider trading. >I'm not going to claim to be an american law expert, but when the agencies can just say "nope" to evidence against them in said court of law, it becomes hard to claim strong legal protections. I may be wrong and misunderstanding the law, but it does seem like that. And as a shot in the dark here I doubt it got any better after the patriot act. This is nonsense. In your example the court said "nope" to the defendant trying to push a conspiracy theory which could not possibly have exonerated him. Here's a decent read on the Nacchio case without weird conspiracy theory bullshit https://truthonthemarket.com/2008/03/31/some-thoughts-on-the-nacchio-d…

There is a fringe economic theory, popular mainly in right "libertarian" circles, that claims otherwise, e.g.: https://truthonthemarket.com/2014/09/13/peter-thiel-on-the-virtues-of-…

You can't count on senators to know what they are talking about. This article from yesterday I found quite helpful in explaining the details of the situation. https://truthonthemarket.com/2020/09/14/the-antitrust-case-against-goo…

That's competition. Monopoly is when you don't have real competitors. And yet somehow they compete vs. Amazon, Target and a thousand other stores. They don't have control over the supply of any particular good, it's not like an ISP where they have covenants with local governments that limit competition, they're not Standard Oil. They're not even at the level of Microsoft, because there's not much they can do to exclude competition. But I guess some people have tried this tact, before. Here's an article which discusses many of the points you've made and explains why they don't make sense: https://truthonthemarket.com/2006/07/10/the-unconvincing-antitrust-cas…

I don't actually know, honestly, what the point was/is exactly. Partly to affect long-term change in how personal data is viewed (less "gold mine, let's collect it all" and more "potentially toxic asset, let's collect as little as possible"). But also partly deletion and opt-out also of course, and that probably works well, for those who use it. But with the huge implementation cost (cited by PwC as upwards of 150 billion USD in the U.S alone [0]), I wonder what the price per delete request or opt-out is. [0]: https://truthonthemarket.com/2019/05/24/gdpr-after-one-year-costs-and-…

It could go that way but it's usually the most powerful to have the connections with lawmakers and suggest what to write (or not to write) in some laws. About unintended consequences, check this article about GDPR after one year https://truthonthemarket.com/2019/05/24/gdpr-after-one-year-costs-and-… I quote a couple of sentences but there is much more there > After the rule took effect in May, Google’s tracking software appeared on slightly more websites, Facebook’s on 7% fewer, while the smallest companies suffered a 32% drop, according to Ghostery, which develops privacy-enhancing web technology. > The fact that Google’s compliance strategy has ended up hurting its competitors and redirecting higher demand back to its own marketplace, where it can guarantee it has user consent, has unsettled publishers and ad tech vendors

Not OP, but for more, see: http://truthonthemarket.com/2009/12/29/the-collected-works-of-henry-g-… As a thought experiment, in an environment where for-profit entities will tend to try to increase their profits, consider: in what cases is it appropriate for governments to interfere with economic activities? To protect individuals, or _caveat emptor_? To protect businesses, or "free market"?

It's a law to protect dealers being undercut by the manufacturers selling direct to the public. http://truthonthemarket.com/2013/06/24/tesla-and-the-auto-dealers-lobb…

> It happens to be a corporation that has a legal obligation not to me but to its shareholders and that obligation is to maximise profit. That's a myth. I belived it was true until someone here on HN linked to a Harvard Business Review article debunking it. Unfortunately I can't find the article, but here's a blog post discussing the issue: http://truthonthemarket.com/2010/07/27/the-shareholder-wealth-maximiza…

In case you missed reading Todd Henderson's response to the thrasing he's taken: http://truthonthemarket.com/2010/09/20/im-sorry/

Like the IBM forever-lawsuit. > The Department of Justice began its antitrust case against IBM on January 17, 1969. The DOJ sued under the Sherman Antitrust Act, claiming IBM tried to monopolize the market for "general-purpose digital computers." The case lasted almost thirteen years, ending on January 8, 1982 when Assistant Attorney General William Baxter declared the case to be "without merit" and dropped the charges. > The case lasted so long, and expanded in scope so much, that by the time the trial began, “more than half of the practices the government raised as antitrust violations were related to products that did not exist in 1969." https://truthonthemarket.com/2020/02/03/the-ghosts-of-antitrust-past-p… It's embarrassing that law/courts are utterly unable to do anything at all to large businesses behaviors. They are so slow in matters of consequence as to be useless.

It's a relatively simple argument first made by Economist Paul Samuelson a century ago. > A businessman could not build it for a profit, since he cannot claim a price from each user. This certainly is the kind of activity that governments would naturally undertake. Even if the operators were able—say, by radar reconnaissance—to claim a toll from every nearby user, that fact would not necessarily make it socially optimal for this service to be provided like a private good at a market-determined individual price. Why not? Because it costs society zero extra cost to let one extra ship use the service; hence any ships discouraged from those waters by the requirement to pay a positive price will represent a social economic loss—even if the price charged to all is no more than enough to pay the long-run expenses of the lighthouse. > https://truthonthemarket.com/2021/06/22/the-virtues-and-pitfalls-of-ec… If one is to pay any amount of money more than the marginal cost, and decides not to that is an example of dead-weight loss. I think the major issue here is that those that wish to abolish copyright and patents aren't then actively promoting another idea, as you say. Let's look at spaces where it is currently illegal to copyright or patent something, say, Maths formulas. Do we have no one working on new maths? No. We have plenty of Mathematicians. They either work for companies creating trade secrets, or they work for Universities releasing their work in journals…

Ok, so add the phrase "I believed that I was enhancing shareholder value" to whatever the thing is that you're doing. People get fired all the time based on bullshit performance improvement plans that come down to "pissed off the manager". I've personally been put on PIP the day after saying some impolitic things because of, officially, a bunch of 2 year old tickets in the bug tracker that were never going to be fixed. Fudging your justifications is a time-honored tradition. How come people are so loathe to do it when 'the shareholders' are involved? EDIT: Was googling and found this: http://truthonthemarket.com/2010/07/27/the-shareholder-wealth-maximiza… There's apparently precedent for very wide latitude given to 'business judgment'. You can do whatever you want as long as you say "I thought I was enhancing shareholder value in the long term" afterwards. This does not explain the meme I referenced above which seems to go way beyond legal CYA into actual moral beliefs in business culture.