17 Dec
2003
17 Dec
'03
11:17 p.m.
Mike Godwin says:
It's always a mistake to confuse technical feasibility for competition. What's to prevent the dominant one or two providers (TPC and Cellular, let's say) from closing out the others by refusing to be interoperable?
Why did virtually all the railroads in the northern U.S. use the same rail gauge BEFORE regulation of the railroads? Why do most of the commercial internet providers (except for the government subsidized ANS) agree to exchange packets with each other freely? Why do open standards do better in the market than closed standards? The answer is "its in their interest to cooperate, thats why." There was actually a really nice article in Forbes recently on game theory and competition vs. cooperation... Perry