Coupled with the concentrating monopolisation of the economy, this creates a phenomenon where helpless consumers are held at ransom: the ultimatum being that they either continue to be exploited in ever more devious ways, or to simply do without. Small businesses that spring up to fulfill the void are bought up quickly in order to squash any hope of real competition.
This is not an economy that works for ordinary people. Ordinary people does include temporarily embarrassed millionaires (and real millionaires, and startups and micro-businesses for that matter) on Hacker News.
The only people who are benefiting overall from these practices are major shareholders and those chasing endless quarterly growth targets.
There is no “monopoly” in the printer industry and it’s definitely not holding the economy “hostage”.
We do not need the government to break up “Big Printer”.
My comment is a general one on markets at large, hyper-focusing on the printer market is only valid as a rhetorical device.
I consider myself pretty ordinary and my life is impacted almost 0 by the forces of elastic markets.
https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk
Businesses are choosing to use their profits to perform stock buybacks instead of innovating or improving standards for their workers:
https://hbr.org/2020/01/why-stock-buybacks-are-dangerous-for...
Meanwhile the cost of living is going through the roof:
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
And pay is not catching up, further aggravated by inflation:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1272447/uk-wage-growth-v...
In the UK we also have a 54% increase in the residential cost of energy (within the context of extreme profiteering from energy manufacturers):
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/03/business/energy-prices-uk...
And 9.1% inflation:
https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/other/uk-inflation-rate-hits-...
This is true across the world. I'm not sure what your life is like, but it sure as hell doesn't match the lived experience of many.
The printer market is a commodity market - the very opposite of a monopoly.
I was making a general argument about the pattern one can see across the economy. The printer market is another example of the same pattern that we see all over the place.
I don't claim that the printer market is a single entity that towers over all - my point is that our economic system optimises for this eventuality. Again: this isn't controversial, antitrust laws have been in place for a very long time.
Will home printer usage decline? Probably yes, but just like I have a home phone that I barely use, people will probably keep a printer around just in case.
But which technology market is a legally defined “monopoly”? Before you mention the phone market, that was already adjudicated during the Epic trial and found not to be the case.
As far as “everyone agreeing that capitalism optimizes for monopolies”. The car market has been around for over a century, is it a monopoly? The computer market? Exactly which market around technology is a legally defined “monopoly”?
This is not even close to being correct. First, monopolies are almost always the products of government interference with markets; "natural" monopolies are rare. Second, antitrust mechanisms were not put in place by benevolent governments to help consumers; they were put in place by governments who were getting political contributions from the failed competitors of the so-called "monopolies", who could not compete on a level playing field and so went to the govenrment to buy favors. The actual results of antitrust enforcement have been to make things worse for consumers, not better.
The average person is impacted by capitalist market economy shenanigans on a continuous basis on nearly everything required to stay alive.
If you don't know the argument against your point of view, that is a good time to do some reading, not more writing.
> my point is that our economic system optimises for this eventuality. Again: this isn't controversial, antitrust laws have been in place for a very long time.
This is a very strange argument, the fact that laws exist to prevent/punish something doesn't mean that everyone agrees that society is optimized to cause such eventualities. Laws are on the books in case something "bad" happens, it doesn't mean that society or the economy is structured to hurtle us towards those "bad" situations. It just means, they could happen and we need to deal with them. There are numerous laws against murder, but I doubt anyone would argue that everyone agrees that our society is inexorably optimized towards common and widespread homicidal tendencies.