the reason why the United States is so hegemonic why it can afford to be the big bully around the world is because of the Monopoly of the payment system

Monopoly is not played on a cartesian plane. It's played on a directed circular graph. Therefore, it is inappropriate to use the Euclidean distance metric to compare the distances between places on the board. We must instead use minimum path lengths. Example: If we used Euclidean distance, then you would have to agree that the distance between, say, Go and Jail is equal to the distance between the Short Line and the Pennsylvania Railroad. Clearly, this is not the intention. In your example, the "nearest railroad" would be the railroad square having the shortest path from wherever you stand. With the game board representing a directed graph, there are no "backwards" paths. Thus, the distance from the pink Chance square to the Reading railroad is not 2. It's 38.

While this partnership made it easier to implement and manage theiTSCi closed supply chain, the sale of minerals to a single entity likeMMR/CDMC created a monopsony situation to the detriment of theminers (Matthysen and Montejano, 2013; Johnson, 2013). Thus, thebargaining capacity of artisanal diggers over mineral price setting wasdramatically reduced. As a result, diggers often violently opposed theMMR/CDMC’s price-setting policies (Wakenge, 2017).

Today, the ITSCI programme largely dominates the DRC mining sites at such a level that it benefits froma monopsony situation, in which, miners can only sell 3T minerals to ITSCI if they want to enter in thelegal supply chain. More options would accelerate and facilitate the access to a legal supply chain, butalso give more power to artisanal miners to negotiate the value of their production, the selling pricehaving a demonstrated important influence on their revenue.

First, iTSCi, which remains the only legal way of sourcing 3 T minerals fromeastern DRC by 2015, created a transnational monopsony through the bot-tleneck position of smelters, effectively de-linking local pricing from worldmarket prices. This increases transaction costs for upstream stakeholders:while transnational businesses manage to buy at artificially lowered prices(iTSCi charges its operational cost on members), miners, cooperatives, andmiddlemen bear the brunt. With the imposition of prices, the economic turn-over of artisanal miners eventually declines. In addition, without comple-mentary livelihood projects that make up for the loss of informal solidarityand pre-financing arrangements (that used to provide a basis for economicactivity in the “informal” scheme), formalisation inevitably reduces livelihoodoptions,

towards formalization of theartisanal mining sector in eastern DRC has been the emergence of buying monopolies atthe local level. Only comptoirs meeting the standards of the Itsci traceability schemehave been able to get their minerals sold to Western end-users in the 3T industry, andthis has given them the power to unilaterally impose certain conditions on theirsuppliers.

The FTC, of which Khan is now chair, contends that Amazon has found a way to push up prices after all, without losing shoppers. It does this, the FTC argues, by imposing ever-higher fees on third-party sellers, who have no choice but to pass these costs on to shoppers by raising their prices. If those businesses try to sell more cheaply elsewhere, Amazon throttles their sales on its platform—which, thanks to the central place in e-commerce that Amazon has built up over the years, can be a death sentence for these businesses. So, according to the FTC, sellers generally absorb the high fees by inflating their prices not just on Amazon but across the web—precluding the price competition that could loosen Amazon’s grip on e-commerce.

Mobile network operators, often government sanctioned monopolies granted via spectrum licenses, are in increasing competition with an explosion of “open spectrum” technologies and new operating models for wireless networks.

Right now without your help, without support from loyal readers, we will not be able to continue publishing. Since Google has decided to dominate online advertising and destroyed small ad agencies, ad rates for independent sites have diminished to a trickle. Please ask yourself: Have we helped you choose movies that are appropriate for your family? Then make sure we continue publishing by becoming a sustaining member for as little as $1 a month -- that's the price of a small coffee, only once a month. It's up to you.

Magie's game was becoming increasingly popular around the Northeastern United States. College students attending Harvard, Columbia, and University of Pennsylvania, left-leaning middle class families, and Quakers were all playing her board game. Three decades after The Landlord's Game was invented in 1904, Parker Brothers published a modified version, known as Monopoly. Charles Darrow claimed the idea as his own, stating that he invented the game in his basement. Magie spoke out against them and reported that she had made a mere $500 from her invention and received none of the credit for Monopoly.[7] In January 1936, an interview with Magie appeared in a Washington, D.C. newspaper, in which she was critical of Parker Brothers. Magie spoke to reporters about the similarities between Monopoly and The Landlord's Game. The article published spoke to the fact that Magie spent more money making her game than she received in earnings, especially with the lack of credit she received after Monopoly was created. After the interviews, Parker Brothers agreed to publish two more of her games but continued to give Darrow the credit for inventing the game itself.[11] Darrow was known as the inventor of Monopoly until Ralph Anspach discovered Magie's patents and her relation to the Monopoly game while fighting a legal battle with the Parker Brothers because of his Anti-Monopoly game. Subsequently, her invention of The Landlord's Game has been given more attention and research. Despite the fact that Darrow and the Parker Brothers capitalized on and were credited with her idea, she posthumously received credit for one of the most popular board games.[3]

Hence, to keep things balanced, I think we should constantly oppose the anti-competitive behavior by tech giants and start using Mozilla Firefox (in whatever capacity, even as a secondary browser).

The anarchist inspiration is clear than ever here: social complexity without “monopoly of legitimate violence” has been possible before, and can be possible again.

I created a social justice metaphor library to help explain concepts like why you can't just create a "level playing field" without acknowledging the economic impacts of history (see, even saying it like that is complicated).

When gold was discovered in the Yukon, 100,000 people desperately tried to make it to a small patch of land in one of the most remote environments on the continent. Few made it all the way. The Klondike Gold Rush was many things: a media conspiracy, a ponzi scheme, a land grab. But above all, it was a humanitarian disaster that stretched over much of the Pacific Northwest.

This pattern lies at the heart of the shell corporation we call “Canada,” and forms the logic of both domestic and international policy. The mining industry is the most egregious example. Over 75 percent of the world’s mining companies are based in Canada.

Canada is not an accident or a work in progress or a thought experiment. I mean that Canada is a scam — a pyramid scheme, a ruse, a heist. Canada is a front. And it’s a front for a massive network of resource extraction companies, oil barons, and mining magnates.

“Canada is not an accident or a work in progress or a thought experiment. I mean that Canada is a scam — a pyramid scheme, a ruse, a heist. Canada is a front. And it’s a front for a massive network of resource extraction companies, oil barons, and mining magnates.”

accountability, reparations, and radical social change

Neurons, synapses, electrochemical receptors, and a compromised immune system.

Big Tech Monopolies

Corporate Monopoly on Public Discourse

monopoly over public discourse

I have always rooted for Mozilla in preventing Google from obtaining unequivocal control of what has become the most critical software platform in the modern era, one that holds relevance in nearly everyone's life: the web.

After working on the problem for a while, we boiled it down to a 4-turn (2 per player), 9 roll (including doubles) game. Detail on each move given below. If executed quickly enough, this theoretical game can be played in 21 seconds (see video below).

“Finance is, like, done. Everybody’s bought everybody else with low-cost debt. Everybody’s maximised their margin. They’ve bought all their shares back . . . There’s nothing there. Every industry has about three players. Elizabeth Warren is right,” Ubben told the Financial Times.

Occasionally, like with search engines, #2 occurs because the incumbents gain massive economies of scale (classic Microeconomics), where by virtue of their being large, the cost to produce each incremental good or service at scale becomes much lower.

The slightly more dangerous scenario where the market has a winner-take-all effect, where one firm or organization ends up controlling over 70% of the market.

Most important, though, is restoring an appreciation for the importance of interoperability in preventing monopolies and promoting technological self-determination for communities and individuals.

Although it is open-source, Snap on the other hand, only works with the Ubuntu Store. Nobody knows how to make a Snap Store and nobody can. The Snap client is designed to work with only one source, following a protocol which isn’t open, and using only one authentication system. Snapd is nothing on its own, it can only work with the Ubuntu Store.

There is very little academic and statistical study of Wal-Mart’s impact on the health of its suppliers and virtually nothing in the last decade, when Wal-Mart’s size has increased by a factor of five. This while the retail industry has become much more concentrated. In large part, that’s because it’s nearly impossible to get meaningful data that would allow researchers to track the influence of Wal-Mart’s business on companies over time. You’d need cooperation from the vendor companies or Wal-Mart or both–and neither Wal-Mart nor its suppliers are interested in sharing such intimate detail.

This victory for Hush-A-Phone was widely considered a watershed moment in the development of a secondary market for terminal equipment, in addition to contributing to the breakup of the Bell System.

So how then has it become so widely popular to call a patent a monopoly when that is simply incorrect?

Therefore, when there is no market there can never be a monopoly because you cannot be in exclusive control of a non-existent market, and you cannot manipulate prices when no one is willing to buy what you are offering.

Customers were prohibited from connecting equipment not made or sold by Bell to the network.

In mid-2017, the EU’s antitrust watchdog hit Google with a $2.7 billion fine for unfairly favoring its own service over those of its rivals

Spotify is directly mimicking Google and Facebook, and attempting to roll up power over digital audio markets the way Google and Facebook did over the internet. It has already done so in music. Here’s Rolling Stone, reporting on Spotify’s exploitation of its public utility platform of music distribution to organizes payola-style extortion against artists.

and hand control to Big Ag

Privacy and security could be more widely compromised if there’s an issue with Chromium.

With Chromium taking so much market share, it’s easy to imagine competition slowing down and browser technology getting less diverse.

It’s not just logging off of Facebook; it’s logging off the countless websites that use Facebook to log in. It’s not just using DuckDuckGo instead of Google search; it’s abandoning my email, switching browsers, giving up a smartphone, and living life without mapping apps. It’s not just refusing to buy toilet paper on Amazon.com; it’s being blocked from reading giant swaths of the internet that are hosted on Amazon servers, giving up websites and apps that I didn’t previously know were connected to the biggest internet giant of them all.

LinkedIn not only connects you with other professionals but also with companies and recruiters. The company has uniquely positioned itself as the only platform worthy of professional networking.

The concern of net neutrality supporters is not that major media outlets will find a new way to slug it out with each other for market share, but that everyone else—bloggers, niche news sources and small websites generally—will be priced out of the market for priority service and consigned to a much poorer internet experience

It wasn’t all that long ago (well, at least, when you’re my age) that one network—AT&T—ran the whole show.

In spite of all the monopolist’s alarm bells that this decision meant the end of network qualityand the end of reliable service as we knew it, just the opposite came to pass. The idea of having a network that couldn’t discriminate against innovators who wanted to improve it finallybegan to break the choke-hold that the gatekeeper had on the system.

previous telecommunications and media technologies, also conceived in openness, eventually fell victim to consolidated control bya few powerful interests, speculative mania by investors, and mistaken government policies which assumed that wise public policywas no public policy.

Allowing gigantic corporations—in manycases, monopolyor duopoly broadband Internet access service providers—to exercise unfettered control over Americans’ access to the Internet not only creates risks to technological innovation and economic growth, but it poses a real threat to freedom of speech and the future of our democracy.

turning point in the struggle to ensure the continued openness of the Internet against powerful gatekeeper control.

Macintyre, Ben.   "The Allure of the Tiny Red Plastic Hotel."     The [London] Times.   21 December 2007.

In the first quarter of 2016, 85 cents of every new dollar spent in online advertising will go to Google or Facebook, according to Brian Nowak, an analyst with Morgan Stanley.