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Comment by antihero | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn’t say it is necessarily considered good. Someone or something is always working for it.

Every company out there has, wants, or wishes they could transform their goods or services into recurring revenue. The Apple “cloud” pivot contributed heavily to their market cap growth to and above 1T. Literal rent seeking.

Providing a service is working. Updating maps; upgrading software; enhancing services; improving security; supporting, provisioning and refreshing back end hardware. That’s all work. They have thousands of employees and thousands more contractors working on maps alone, and that’s not even a paid product.

Right and you don’t own anything. Just purchase some amount of service periodically at a steep markup. The mbas saw what was going on in services and wanted to turn everything into a similarly periodic transaction.

I have an iPhone, don't pay a penny in recurring services, and it all works fine. I do have a Backblaze subscription for my desktop, which I'm very happy with. With private relay I'm seriously considering signing up with a paid iCloud account though. I mean how is that abusive, but a paid VPN subscription is considered a leet hacker move for those in the know? It's just snobbery.

> I mean how is that abusive, but a paid VPN subscription is considered a leet hacker move for those in the know?

From what I've seen it's not really those "in the know", but rather those convinced by half-assed explanations of what paid VPN subscriptions do by YouTube sponsorships.

Not at all. The majority of the profit of new-feudal companies come from a dominant position on the market. Same as rent-seeking when you own 80% of a city.

The cost of the work required to provide those services is marginal - as clearly proven by the big profit margins.

Oh and those "free" services are paid by selling your privacy.

I was addressing the actual example given, so yes, ‘at all’. The fact there are other companies that are rent seeking is a separate point. You’re seriously saying Apple specifically, the company called out, sells privacy? Do tell.

As for Market dominance, since when was being popular and making products a lot of people like and value somehow abhorrent?

> As for Market dominance, since when was being popular and making products a lot of people like and value somehow abhorrent?

Please argue in good faith...

https://www.oecd.org/competition/abuse/

I am arguing in good faith. The example specifically called out, not by me, was Apple. If the majority of Apples profits come from market abuse, how do you explain the fact that their profit margins now are about the same as they were when they were a small minority player in markets? In fact they still are in most of the markets they compete in.

Surely market abuse should allow them to significantly expand profitability, but it hasn’t. Overall profits yes, but that’s just because they have higher sales now.

There are some companies I would agree do abuse their positions significantly to distort markets. Google and Facebook have been caught explicitly doing so.

That’s not what rent-seeking means

https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentSeeking.html

If you buy a vacant property and hold onto it until population growth and lack of development brings prices up, who is working?

New entrants, the people who have to pay a million dollars for a small house has to work for that million.

I don't think that makes sense. It applies to almost any transaction. Those people will be working and earning regardless, it's just that a higher proportion of their income will be devoted to accommodation.

Whoever buys it or rents it

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