Tag Archives: objectivism

Competition in services and employment

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Although I usually talk myself back into objectivism by the end of it (and I’m sure that’s how this post will turn out), I do always think about the consequences of various things. A truly free market, for instance. An article about Google Maps being sued in France because they’re offering their service for free, so competing services can’t charge.

I think this small company has a point. The two offer pretty much exactly the same services to businesses, only Google does it for free. Google’s able to do it for free because they’re okay with making a loss, even massive losses if necessary. Bottin Cartographes, the guys suing, say that Google just wants to kick everyone else out of the market and then maybe they’ll start charging once there are no alternatives. Which’ll give them a monopoly.

Much like if Asda decided to give away all their products for free, paying for it out of their past profits and reserves, until every other supermarket decides they just can’t compete and go under. Then Asda could start charging £100 for a can of beans to start making their money back. You’d pay it because there’d be no where else.

Of course, they’d never do that because they’d just lose too much money far too quickly. But for Google giving away their data in an API only costs them a bit of bandwidth. For a company that makes billions of pounds a year from advertising, Google could probably go forever before they’d run out of money and have to start charging for their services.

That’s not a possibility though. There are other companies that too can give away their maps and data for free. Yahoo, although faltering, can still offer the same service. Bing maps, Maps.com, Mapquest. I’d say there’s enough competition in these waters. All of them giving the same service and all of them embracing revolutionary business models.

So, once again, I guess an unregulated market seems to stand on its feet. And it looks like Bottin Cartographes are going to go the way of every other business that refuses to innovate.

Another problem though is exactly that, how do the innovate? You need fresh blood that isn’t afraid to try quirky things. No discredit to the people at Bottin, I’m sure they’re good at what they do, but maybe they just don’t understand how things work around these parts. So they have to go job hunting for those people, and the prime place to get their from is universities.

Therein lies the problem… It’s no secret that Google and Microsoft, and more and more so Apple, try to get as many graduates as they can. Google especially, with them hiring more engineers than they actually even need, just so they have the whole ‘class of 2009′ set, I guess. Students know that when they actually get to Google they’ll probably get mundane customer service jobs, and maybe not see any code for a good few months, but who cares? It’s fucking Google! The enticement is just too much for them.

And that leaves none left for the smaller start-ups, or people like Bottin that really need a new a revitalising wave.

My first though to combat that was that maybe businesses that need the graduates could sponsor them, paying for their tuition fees on condition that when they graduate they come to work for them for a reasonable rate (considering they just paid for your schooling) for a certain number of years or something. Free tuition and a definite job at the end of the course would be something I’d snap at.

But at $38,925 a year, I doubt a start-up could afford that much for one kid, who could fail horribly and not be able to work for you or even pay the money back. It’d be a huge risk that no one but these big companies could afford – and they’re exactly the opposite of the people that should be getting these graduates.

A lesser investment could be something strongly advertising jobs around campuses. Or even just being in close contact with the university’s employment centre. I don’t imagine that a cool company like Twitter or Tumblr, even though they’re not big high rollers, would have a problem getting the right employees. But not all businesses can be that cool. There needs to be professional businesses that maybe just inherit a boring reputation. How would they entice students to work for them when they’re competing for them with Google?

There’s no need for the government to step in

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I’d probably be the person my friends would think most likely to lobby for laws net neutrality, but they’d be wrong. Don’t get me wrong, I’m massively pro-net neutrality and think it’s vital for the continued growth of the Internet and innovation. What I don’t agree with is further legislation.

In England, our current state of play is that the government thinks everything is fine, despite BT capping and throttling. I agree with them. I don’t think that the government should step in and force private companies to follow their morals. The government has no say in how BT should be running their company.

But I’m paying for an 8Mb connection! That’s what I should get.

No, you’re not paying for an 8Mb connection, you’re paying for the service laid out in the terms and conditions you signed up for. Terms which you said you agreed to when you made the contract for your service. Those conditions openly say “we’re going to throttle your connection to 896Kbps for streaming videos”, and everything else Ars is complaining about. If you don’t like that, there’s plenty of competitors who offer different terms. Use them.

There are hidden terms like this all over England; buy one get one free (the cheapest product is the free one) — free calls between 7am and 7pm (if you start a call at 6pm, and then go past 7pm, you’ll be charged for the entire call) — 30% less fat! (30% smaller bag). It just enforces that it’s important to read the small print. That’s all the onus there is, and all that there should be on businesses.

Whilst I don’t think there should be harsher laws about how terms are written, I do think it’d be a good idea for businesses to voluntarily add a simpler version of their terms. Just to make their customers happier. I can’t seem to find it, but I once found a website who had the normal legal text – hard to understand by anyone that’s not a lawyer – but by the side they had simple explanations. In someone like digg’s case, by the side of…

By creating and posting Content to Digg, you warrant that you own all rights to the Content, agree that the Content will be dedicated to the public domain under the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication, available at http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ and that you will not object to the use of the Content by Digg in any context. To clarify, the above does not apply to the Content on external sites linked to by the original submission.

They could have “this just means that anything you give us is going to be put into the public domain, so anyone can do anything with it.” Digg’s ToS is actually pretty easy to read already, but other companies could really do with doing that too.

I don’t want to spend half an hour reading something before I can use a product!

That’s your choice, but the business has done everything they need to do in my opinion. You can’t complain when they suspend your account for doing something they don’t want, or when you’re hit with hidden charges. It’s your responsibility to read that stuff.

If the government can’t regulate, then who’s watching for consumer rights?

The consumers. If BT customer doesn’t like something they should leave BT, boycotting it. If enough customers are leaving (so it’s a big problem) BT will change. If you stick around with BT and put up with you, you’re sending the message that you’re okay with it.

That’s why I’m hopeful that if non-net neutrality comes into place, it’ll be fairly quickly kicked to the curb. There will always be some good guys in business. I’ve heard good things about Be. If there’s truly not anyone filling that need, then someone will pretty quickly notice it and set up a business there. (Hey, why not you?)

In sum, quit worrying about net neutrality, it’s here to stay. Government shouldn’t keep regulating businesses, let the customers do that. (You can almost feel Ayn Rand in the room, amirite?)