On a lark, he wrote it up as patentable innovation. His boss thought it was funny and approved it. So did the lawyers. He ended up with one of the little plaques they gave employees for patents. And maybe a cash bonus? It was long enough ago that I forget. But apparently that's what IBM does: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17835839
Nearly 20 years ago, in initial bootcamp in big-corp, there was half a day course by a patent guy, and one of the warnings he gave was "be careful where you search for your new idea" - the most wellknown patent search web site then, was owned by.. IBM.
It was just a design for a computer network, using run of the mill off the shelf equipment doing things I'm pretty sure is done / drawn out in tons of network design books and etc. But apparently it was a 'system' or some term like that he used.
I smiled and just moved on....
But it's possible to keep up. US financial markets have a lot of internal regulation for traders, so they're wrangling some of the most aggressive do-anything-for-a-buck people on the planet. Nonetheless, the traders are generally kept in check. I used to do tech for derivatives traders and we knew to never, ever fuck around with a market.
That didn't always stop our traders, of course. We had some based in Frankfurt who hated living there. They decided they wanted to live in London, and so quietly shifted their trading terminals to our London office. This was strictly forbidden; at least at the time, the mid-90s, trading on the Deutche Terminborse was to take place on German soil and nowhere else.
Eventually the regulators got suspicious and so they were standing outside ringing the bell while watching our trading activity. So one of my technical colleagues had to rent a van, load everything up, drive it 10 hours back to Frankfurt, and have it all working by the next morning. Which we did, and so avoided formal sanction, but it was close. That probably kept those traders from doing something foolish for at least another year.
Never mind those manipulations that make it through the regulatory filter, a la mortgage securitization circa 2008.
Do you mean ringing manually the bell of the end-of-the-day of the stock exchange? When they rang it the first time, didn’t they catch them not going out of the building?
> regulatory capture ... is the end result of ANY regulation.
All evidence to date supports this conclusion.
Can we do better?
Regulations are two-party, can be distilled down to us vs them.
How do we make them three party? Transmute them into trilemmas? (Tripods are more stable that bipods.)
Maybe grant a seat to the parties on the receiving end, the natural antagonists to the parties being regulated. And empower them appropriately.
Regulatory capture is an economic theory that regulatory agencies may come to be dominated by the interests they regulate and not by the public interest. The result is that the agency instead acts in ways that benefit the interests it is supposed to be regulating.
It's really about established players being able to invest in controlling the regulators that are specific to them, while new players considering entering obviously don't have this advantage. Structurally it's similar to NIMBYism.