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Comment by _jal | Hacker News Reader

> What you call 'negative sum' some of us call 'competition'

The broken windows fallacy doesn't suddenly become net-positive when renamed. Perhaps humans are not capable of improving interaction outcomes any further than we've gotten and humanity has reached peak efficiency re: transaction costs and firm-size, but I have a hard time believing that.

> Sometimes loops seem wasteful ... like lawyers ... until you actually do get sued or need to sue etc..

That 'actually getting sued' part is your induction in to the loop. It doesn't justify the bullshit, it is an object lesson in how it works.

Kafka is still required reading.

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If it wasn't 'net positive' not only would we not be having this conversation over the 'internet' - we'd still be in the dark ages.

"That 'actually getting sued' part is your induction in to the loop."

No, it's not. It's not always clear what is illegal, what is not, what is infringement, what is not.

Rather than having a totalitarian authority create, divide and control IP etc. we have adversarial law and companies can file suit and work it out in court.

When there isn't overt corruption in the system, it works reasonably well.

That we're even having this conversation over the internet in 2018 is evidence that it's not 'negative sum'.

> If it wasn't 'net positive' not only would we not be having this conversation over the 'internet' - we'd still be in the dark ages.

The internet was developed by Darpa so I'm not sure what you're trying to imply here. Competition did not produce the internet, and the telecommunications industry, which came about after as a commercialization project, has serious issues which make this an even harder argument to make.

Competition definitely created the telecommunications industry and by the way most of the electric grid as well.

'The internet' as we know it was not created by DARPA.

DARPA created some protocols - of which there were many, private and public.

It just so happens that a certain version of it got a critical mass - it didn't have to be that way. And a lot of private interests were involved, particularly private universities.

The network over which the internet was overlaid is entirely commercial - and of course most of the variation of it has been commercial, or non-governmental type NGOs, i.e consortiums.

Nobody is going to argue that some projects, particularly long-term/pure R&D, or projects that literally require a scale that's out of reach of even the largest private entities, are not going to require some kind of collective participation.

But the argument that competition is kafkaesque or inherently problematic because of entities competing for the same turf is short sighted.

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