this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
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At the same time, we'll have to recognize that a world without megacorps is going to involve a much greater presence of state power in the technological sphere due to the need to standardize communication protocols to facilitate a free market of mutually communicable softwares and hardwares.
The question will stop being about how we stop price gouging for the latest iPhone and more about how we prevent a situation like HIPAA where people are forced to use a less secure less efficient technology because it was the most efficient and secure at the time Congress was last able to get off it's ass to legislate on the matter.
Corporations are doing a bad job at it as well. While Gouvernement standards tend to be slow and stagnant, the free market produces an incomprehensible sea of standards. Like with USB, HDMI, 3/4G signals, cat-X Internet cables. If a single global manufacturer decides to do things slightly different you get a new version of a standard that everybody has to be compatible with.
Additionally, corporations will only invent the standards that they benefit from. A government can introduce requirements that people benefit from.
There are plenty of communication protocols that are developed and expanded without corporate support, one of which is the ActivityPub protocol, which this platform is built on.
You're assuming that we must have a free market and a state though. Those are not requirements for many economic theories.
They are requirements for any theory that intends for there to be economy at a scale beyond a tyranny of cousins and inequitable allocation of non municipally managed resources.
It also sounds as if you believe there can't be any sort of democratic accountability to a free market, which is just not even remotely true, there is objectively nothing which makes worker ownership of productive firms incompatible with the sale of what they produce in a free economy.
I have no clue where you got that assumption, but I'm well aware of worker cooperatives, and that worker cooperatives are compatible with a socialist free market. All I said was that not all economic theories require the assumptions you made.