zlacker

>>pavel_+(OP)
> If we look at major commercial databases today, two out of the three big names in commericial databases forbid publishing benchmarks.

I see many people bashing Oracle/Ellison, but they are not alone in this. MS does the same thing as well. The really worrying thing is that such practices are deemed to be legal. The entire principle of Free Markets is underpinned by consumers having accurate information about the goods they are purchasing. Having licensing agreements that are expressly designed to prevent the dissemination of product-information, goes against everything that Capitalism and Free-Markets stand for.

The fact that there are no government regulations against such behavior, is precisely what leads people to think that we are living in a Corporatocracy, and not a Free Market.

>>whack+2d
> The entire principle of Free Markets is underpinned by consumers having accurate information about the goods they are purchasing. Having licensing agreements that are expressly designed to prevent the dissemination of product-information, goes against everything that Capitalism and Free-Markets stand for.

I agree with where you are going but I entirely disagree with your description of Free Markets and Capitalism.

free market - an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses

There's nothing in there about consumers having accurate information. If anything, caveat emptor. Moreover, if you are a free market entrepreneur then the absolute last thing you want is fairness to your competition or fairness to your consumer. Those are costs of doing business, to be avoided if possible. Naturally, Larry is only trying to avoid them.

That's why we have regulation. That's why civilization has evolved to have government. That's why Libertaristan isn't on any maps. That's why The Fountainhead is such a misguided fantasy where entrepreneurs can do anything and it's always better and governments can do nothing and it's always worse.

Free Markets and Capitalism don't stand for anything. That's not even a criticism of them either. Civilization might stand for something although that something is a provisional something at best but then that provisional something is better than nothing.

The requirement for consumers having accurate information is a government regulation. In the United States, it's enforced by the Consumer Protection Agency. It isn't a free market requirement.

>>CalChr+ak
I think you and I might agree on "how things should be", but have different definitions for the term Free-Market. I understand that there are many different ways of defining this term, and that there is no right or wrong answer here. When I referred earlier to the ideals of Free-Markets, I was referring to the economic ideal of one with Perfect Competition. This is an ideal that can never be realized of course, but I believe that the closer we come to this ideal, the better off we will be. Banning of price-fixing, false-advertising, and trust-busting, are all examples of public policy that betray Libertarian principles in order to further Perfect Competition, and that's something we need a lot more of today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition#Idealizing...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_information

>>whack+4n
Yeah, I think we agree on how things should be. But Perfect Competition and Free Market are two very different things. I think a lot of free market nutjobs would think of perfect competition as socialist interference in free markets.

>>CalChr+rn
Err sort of... perfect competition is an ideal that has reasonably close analogues in the real world--otherwise the idea wouldn't be very useful. For example, some agricultural products are this way without the kind of government interference you are suggesting.

And your assertion about information asymmetry having nothing to do with free markets is actually addressed in the economic literature on perfect competition.

>>wallac+PI
Perfect competition is actually not a very useful concept in the real world. In Silicon Valley, we live and die with patents which are term limited monopolies. That's as far from perfect competition as you can get. The entire concept of intellectual property is anti-competitive.

>>CalChr+sK
There are a lot of examples where markets are far from perfect competition; actually most markets are like this. It's just useful to the extent we can see markets that come close to this appear to function well, and so we should use regulation to bring markets closer to this.