Tag Archives: markets

An Inappropriate Judicial Question

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The Apple-Epic trial has gone to the jury (in this case, the judge, the matter being a bench trial). This case centers on the level of commissions Apple charges app developers for marketing their apps in Apple’s App Store and whether those app developers can, under Apple’s rules, market their products/collect revenue for their products through other venues as well as the App Store—vis., in-app advertising.

In the course of the trial, the presiding judge—the “bench”—US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, has asked an inappropriate question.

…confronted Mr Cook [Apple CEO] with survey data that, she said, indicated that 39% of developers were either very dissatisfied or somewhat dissatisfied with Apple’s distribution services. “How is that acceptable?” she asked.

There is much to decry about Apple’s business practices, particularly with its App Store.

In particular, one would think those survey results to be unacceptable, to developers, users, even to Apple.

However.

The question is a business matter, solely among Apple, its customer/developers, and the market in general. It is not at all a judicial matter, and it is completely out of place and inappropriate for a judge to ask in a courtroom.

Maybes and Could Bes

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Illumina is a company that makes platforms that do genetic sequencing for the likes of Covid variants and fetal abnormalities. Grail is a company that has blood tests that can detect DNA from cancer cells before people show symptoms. At the outset, Illumina created Grail for that purpose then spun the company off so each could focus on what it does best.

Grail succeeded, strongly.

Now Illumina wants to (re)acquire Grail, and Grail wants to be (re)acquired. Illumina says its regulatory satisfaction expertise can greatly facilitate bringing Grail’s tests to market and to the benefit of countless folks at risk of any of the 50 cancers Grail’s tests can detect quickly and reliably, along with the 12 most deadly cancers with 60% accuracy. All with a simple blood draw.

Potential competitors petitioned the Federal Trade Commission to block the merger, and the FTC agreed and has sued to block the merger.

That’s a problem. The FTC’s case centers on two premises and a false underlying assumption. The merger would, according to the FTC,

lessen competition in the US multi-cancer early detection (MCED) test market by diminishing innovation and potentially increasing prices.

“Diminishing innovation”—not at all. Aside from the lack of actual evidence of such a diminution—this is just tacit speculation—this sort of development only spurs competition (my own, no more or less valid speculation).

“Potentially increasing prices”—again, not at all. That first word says it all: the plaint is just overt speculation. There are no increasing prices here, and there’s no evidence that increasing prices are per se anticompetitive (as opposed, for instance, due to too high demand for too little product. Never mind that neither demand nor product yet exist.)

The false underlying assumption is that a market for this sort of thing even exists. It does not, and that lack renders both of those speculations, individually and severally, wholly irrelevant.

Maybes and could bes in a nonexistent market—what a way to regulate.

A Compendium of Reasons

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Nike provides them, to do two things.

Here’s Nike’s ad regarding the WNBA. Especially beginning at 0:19, and most especially Nike’s closer, starting at 0:23.

The two things: continue not watching the WNBA, and not doing business with Nike (which company also does enthusiastic business with the genocide-committing People’s Republic of China, so here’s an additional reason for not doing business with Nike).

 

H/t Not the Bee

Wuhan Virus Vaccines and Intellectual Property

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President Joe Biden (D) is looking at “waiving” the patents held by American pharmaceutical companies—Pfizer and Moderna—that  developed the vaccines that have been so effective against the Peoples Republic of China-released Wuhan Virus.

Leave aside the uselessness of waiving these patent rights because the vaccines require to much, too varied, too complex equipment to be manufacturable just on the basis of the vaccines’ technologies being made freeware in the public arena.

Leave aside, too, that these companies—and others beyond American jurisdiction that have developed other Wuhan Virus vaccines—already are delivering doses virtually at cost to the poorer nations.

Biden’s proposal [is] to temporarily waive their patents, but that’s completely disingenuous. An intellectual property once lost is lost forever—there is nothing temporary about such a waiver except in the narrowest, most legalist, sense.

The larger problem is the: with that government-mandated loss will go any incentive a company might have to spend the billions of dollars it takes to develop future such things, especially vaccines, since a company can have no confidence Government might decide it “needs” to give the new patents away also.

There will be very little vaccine development in the United States after Biden goes through with this.

This will not be over quickly. We will not enjoy this.

Let’s Make Lots of Money

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Sounds like a lyric from a Pet Shop Boys song.

The hackers who assaulted Colonial Pipeline, ostensibly for ransom, claim they

only want[] to make money, not disrupt society….

Never mind that their attack on a major oil pipeline does precisely that disruption.

Never mind, either, that these hackers aren’t total idiots—they knew their assault would disrupt a major segment of our economy and so our society. That was the purpose of the attack; this was no petty criminal act. Demanding to be paid by their victim is simply a distraction.

They claimed this, also:

From today we introduce moderation and check each company that our partners want to encrypt to avoid social consequences in the future.

Right. And they have some bridges across the Reka Vop’ to sell us, also. All illegal behavior, much less terrorist behavior, if left unanswered has social consequences.

No, these…personages…have simply applied a Willy Sutton tenet to their terrorism:

Go where the money is. Go there often.

Our Federal government, actively aided by our State governments, need to get aggressive with active responses to such attacks. The time for passivity, for merely acting defensively after the fact, is long past. Terrorists, physical or cyber, network entities or state-sponsored, need to be burned to the ground.

The negligence of company CEOs, COOs, and CIOs, including those officers at Colonial Pipeline, in not being serious about hardening their systems, also badly wants sanction.