How long have you been in your current role? You can talk with your boss, and let them know you'd like to go down to part time. No guarantees that they'll say yes, but if you don't ask, the answer guaranteed to be "no".
"junction" is pulling the heavy weight here. The station is right before the tracks branch, so the purpose of the station is probably to let riders transfer from service on the one branch to service on the other.
One important thing to know is that the venues/artists often get a kickback of part of the Ticketmaster fees. In other words, the artists, venues, producers, and Ticketmaster are in cahoots to fleece fans for as much money as possible, and Ticketmaster is willing to play the 'bad guy' and take the blame for high prices, and they get to keep a bigger slice of the overall pie than they would in a highly competitive market for ticketing services because they provide that "service".
Take away this dynamic, and the face price of tickets is going to go up, and the total price is unlikely to change substantially.
Personally, I think this would still be a net plus for society. In order for market forces to work well, you need pricing transparency.
If I understand correctly Ticketmaster is still the one creating this problem, they demand exclusivity in their contracts which often means the venue has no choice if they want to participate in a large enough market to continue operating. Similarly artists have trouble securing large venues if not participating in their scheme.
This is the problem with most 'monopolies', they reach a certain critical mass where they can no longer be dealt with on even footing. You are at their mercy as a vendor and as a customer. You can often argue that 'choice' exists, but what choice is it really? Taylor Swift isn't going to come play at our local music house/bar.
To be sure, Live Nation owns and / or operates many of the venues. They also provide management services to artists. So it’s not that TicketMaster demands exclusivity from the venue, they #are# the venue.
And in court they will probably argue that this is vertical integration that creates savings they pass along to the consumer. DOJ will likely argue they are pocketing it.
If isn’t just vertical integration. It’s also abuse of monopoly power. I’m sure the DoJ won’t have any trouble showing how much market share TM/LN have.
I think the real issue is the limited supply of tickets to the most popular shows. Supply and demand dictates that the prices for these limited goods be very high, yet social norms discourage artists from charging the true market value for their tickets (fans will rebel against their favourite artist for perceived greed). So TM provides an effective reputation-laundering service to the artists and collects a hefty fee for it. If the DoJ were to win their case and succeed in breaking up the TM monopoly then I bet the extra revenue would go to some other ticket brokers, not to the artist or into consumers’ pockets.
It’s partly this but also the artists benefit in other ways from large strata of their fan base being able to attend live shows, but merch in person and mingle with each other. The venue and Ticketmaster only benefit from the ticket sales.
Scalpers are also a source of guaranteed sales, so you're diluting the risk of a concert because someone is already buying up all seats already for you and running the risk of not being able to sell them at a higher price later.
The Paramount Decrees way back in the 1940s/1950s: that's why Hollywood studios cannot produce movies and own the theaters which exhibit them. It's also similar to the (much more complex) reasons TV Service Providers (DirectTV, Spectrum, XFinity et. al) are separate from TV Networks, and why you don't see Disney trying to buy, say, DirectTV. Of course, streaming upended almost all of that.
> It’s also similar to the (much more complex) reasons TV Service Providers (DirectTV, Spectrum, XFinity et. al) are separate from TV Networks
Tell me more about how the “TV Service Provider” Xfinity (a subsidiary of Comcast) is separate from the various TV networks run by NBC Universal, LLC (a subsidiary of Comcast).
If you look at many older anti-trust cases from before 1970s, the bar for successful enforcement often seems unbelievably low when comparing it to how things are today. Take a look at this, for example: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/370/294/
But then there was a drastic change in approach to anti-trust during the Reagan era:
"Bork argues that the original intent of antitrust laws as well as economic efficiency makes consumer welfare and the protection of competition, rather than competitors, the only goals of antitrust law. Thus, while it was appropriate to prohibit cartels that fix prices and divide markets and mergers that create monopolies, practices that are allegedly exclusionary, such as vertical agreements and price discrimination, did not harm consumers and so should not be prohibited."
"From 1977 to 2007, the Supreme Court of the United States repeatedly adopted views stated in The Antitrust Paradox in such cases as Continental Television, Inc. v. GTE Sylvania, Inc., 433 U.S. 36 (1977), Broadcast Music, Inc. v. CBS, Inc., NCAA v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, Spectrum Sports, Inc. v. McQuillan, State Oil Co. v. Khan, Verizon v. Trinko, and Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v. PSKS, Inc., legalizing many practices previously prohibited."
Yes, I think they have leveraged their power to keep the situation in their favor and not let a competitor come up. I don't really see a reason we couldn't have 4-5 ticketmaster type companies that still do some of the BS stuff we all hate. The whole thing where Ticketmaster will refuse other artists if your venue doesn't use them is very monopolistic.
Yeah every large venue, even if they were 100% independent, by default has a monopoly within some distance. And their management can access granular population density, income, etc…, data too, so they would all just price roughly the same modulo venue quality and expected demographic within X travel time. Regardless of where the artist chose to perform.
I think that exclusivities are a huge source of market problems in general. They are often used in these ways to create sorts of monopolies and drive prices artificially high.
Beatport, a service that sells music for DJs, has started doing exactly this sort of nonsense. They now have "exclusive" tracks for twice the price, and I would guess that the artists also get a portion of the increased profits. However, for consumers the only change is less choice and DOUBLE the price. Seems very similar to what ticketmaster is doing. I have no idea if they force artists to make all their tracks exclusive if one is, but no doubt that is the next step.
There has got to be a better solution here as it doesn't seem very reasonable to literally be doubling and tripling prices like this. And at the least, if an artist is going to do that, it should be transparent and not hidden under the guise of an exclusivity.
I don't know where you live, but since this is about US law, this has no basis. This goes against the very 1st amendment of the US constitution.
Freedom of association is an essential part of freedom of speech because, in many cases, and as the US Supreme Court has stated, people can engage in effective speech only when they join with others.
The only way you can take this position is IF one of the parties is subject to antitrust action. Which in this case, it is. So we have to trust antitrust!
That being said, I think that is certainly valid to argue for antitrust action to be automatic - so enforcement is not wholly dependent on subjective criteria.
Your comment seems to contradict itself. Freedom of association is constitutionally protected... but it's ok to strip it away if someone is subject to anti-trust action?
I'm not the person you're replying to, but I do live in the US, and unenforceable/illegal contract provisions are pretty common. What is fundamentally different between banning non-compete agreements, and banning exclusivity clauses?
Also I feel like you kinda have it backwards: an exclusivity clause restricts someone's freedom of association. While that's not automatically illegal (since 1A only applies to the government), exclusivity agreements like the ones we're talking about go against the spirit of the idea of freedom of association.
So yes, I'm totally fine with banning exclusivity clauses in contracts (maybe not in all cases; I'm sure there are times when they might be appropriate), and I don't think there's really any conflict with 1A. IANAL, of course.
>>> but it's ok to strip it away if someone is subject to anti-trust action?
The 1st amendment is not absolute if there's competing laws against it. Which i believe is your point, or at least helps your argument as you will see below.
>>> unenforceable/illegal contract provisions are pretty common.
Agreed, for the same reason that it is illegal to sell your body parts. This is because the illegal provisions (freely entered between consenting adults) would be in direct conflict with another established law, and the constitutionality of said law would have been brought up in front of (higher) courts to debate whether X type of association does not run afoul of other rights.
>>> What is fundamentally different between banning non-compete agreements, and banning exclusivity clauses?
There's nothing fundamentally different except the former is now law, under the 13th amendment [1]. The latter has yet to do so. So you could be correct. The 13th amendment is a better pillar vs going strictly against the 1st amendment for (reasons).
> Freedom of association is an essential part of freedom of speech because, in many cases, and as the US Supreme Court has stated, people can engage in effective speech only when they join with others.
Freedom of association like... an exclusivity clause?
Taylor swift is big enough that she could build a venue in each location if she wanted, so that not an issue. If Taylor and a few other large artists gave the middle finger to ticketmaster and basically created their own ticket system, i promise you that they would have enough pull to basically solve this. However, like you said, thats not in their or their labels interest.
I think Pearl Jam did something very similar to that IIRC with regards to ticketing and re-selling.
It was a hit with their fans, but the problem is that only so many acts have the ability to do so (and as you say - it's actually not in their best fiscal interest, so you're going to self-select even further).
Ticketmaster willingly plays the bad guy role, and makes a fuck ton of money in the process.
That said, the vertical integration it has with Live Nation should be considered a monopoly, and trust-busted as such.
Just being devil's advocate since I also don't necessarily agree that TSwift could build a venue in every market, but there are plenty of large-scale events that use open fields and tents and aren't going to cost billions to setup.
Of course, then it also falls to her and her team to handle permits, hiring employees for the concert (and this would be a one time thing for those employees?), training, arranging materials, foods, and anything else, figure out parking and transportation, manage any necessary insurance, and whatever else is needed.
A venue is more than having a place, it's having everything necessary to handle an immense volume of people gathering, acting, and dispersing from a single location in a safe and orderly fashion.
Cirque du Soleil does this. They always setup their own venue on an open ground, but I think that's more for consistency of their layout and apparatus.
> stadiums are multibillion dollar affairs that take years and lots of public financing
That's a 70,000-seat stadium [1][2]. Arenas (5 to 20k) can be built for a few hundred million [3].
Unfortunately, that would mean either nosebleed ticket prices or rationing tickets to fans. The former would earn the fans' ire. The latter reduce the artist's revenue.
Just a FYI, "nosebleed" means the cheapest tickets - ie. the highest up/furthest away from the stage. It's a mountain climbing term related to suffering literal nosebleeds at high altitude.
Ticketmaster: oh the tragedy, our shareholders..they might not get as much profit! housing! think of the homeless! if you build this arena, it will sit dormant 95% of the year, this space could be used to house homeless, so VOTE NO! on question 45 to protect $CITY's homeless!
> "Taylor swift is big enough that she could build a venue in each location if she wanted, so that not an issue."
ABBA actually built their own venue for their ongoing "ABBA Voyage" shows in London[1]. That's a residency, though. I'm not sure about the viability of doing it for a world tour!
They obviously don't need to be multi-billion dollar stadiums. They can be temporary structures or outdoor areas. 120k people watched Elton John on the main stage at Glastonbury last year, twice as many as attended most of the dates for the Eras tour. While not everywhere will have a space that's suitable for a 40-60k outdoor stage, a good number will.
Then perform smaller venues and ration tickets to your most-devoted fans. Unfortunately, if you do that, it's tough to become a billionaire. (Analogy: wineries. On the 4 x 4 of size and price point, you have wines positioned in each quadrant.)
TicketMaster is, or more accurately its exclusivity requirements are, the root of the problem. But everyone around them--from the municipalities that publicly finance and permit exclusivity deals by these stadiums to the artists who perform at them--are profiting from and complicit in the market failure. (Ethically, not legally.)
That's still not a reason for the government to not bust up their rackets. It's about time someone stepped up and did something. I was hoping would be state based like Texas or California, but I'll take action from the feds I guess.
Perhaps not, but your comment was a bit ambiguous as written. Telling an artist "tough luck" if they can't book a larger venue without TM/LN feels like saying there isn't really a problem to be solved here.
> Companies end up bankrupt with your line of thinking
The point is artists want to have their cake and eat it too. Any artist performing at a stadium could make a solid profit performing at non-TM 5 to 20k-seat arena while charging a similar (or lower) price. They don't because it's more lucrative to perform at a 70,000-seat stadium.
LiveNation is a monopolist. But they also give many market participants cover to charge more without offending their fans.
It would probably need to be a different show. Playing to a large stadium means you can afford more trucks and a bigger spectacle. If you're playing for 5,000 people, you've got to tone it down, or you won't make a profit.
who determines what is "a solid profit"? If an artist can sell 70,000 tickets, why should they limit themselves to 20,000? Do you work for 2/7 of your potential salary? And what about the 50,000 fans shut out of the show?
> Then perform smaller venues and ration tickets to your most-devoted fans. Unfortunately, if you do that, it's tough to become a billionaire.
If you do that, it's tough to make any money at all. If you're, say, Dave Matthews Band and you have 50,000 people who want to come to each show, and you start saying you'll only play to 1,000 people at a time, the economics start going sideways. The size of the band has to shrink and/or the cost per ticket has to go way up. The secondhand/scalper market sends tickets sky high.
Ticketmaster/LiveNation allows big acts to fill big venues, which (despite how it may feel sometimes) actually makes the show available to more people at a lower price.
> If you're, say, Dave Matthews Band and you have 50,000 people who want to come to each show, and you start saying you'll only play to 1,000 people at a time, the economics start going sideways
There are plenty of 5 to 20k-seat venues that would be fine.
I don't know about your city, but Live Nation has been eating those up around here. I go to these kinds of venues exclusively, and over the last decade have gone from zero shows sold through Ticketmaster to maybe 50/50. At least the bar shows are safe, but those economics are obviously not fine.
> It’s easy to believe the worst about Live Nation, they have a bad reputation. But the reason I buy this particular story is because it is consistent with the behavior of many dominant middlemen firms in our economy, from pharmacy benefit managers to Amazon to big banks securitizing mortgages in the financial crisis. As monopoly scholar Kate Judge noted, such dominant middlemen use fees and kickbacks, hidden via a complex maze of subsidiaries and overlapping lines of business, to extract in ways that are hard to see. In Live Nation’s case, it’s clear they are generating a great deal of revenue, but somehow show low margins for many of their products. Hiding the price hikes is important, because monopolization is harder to prove that way.
This is a pretty good write up. It's off the mark on one point.
The artists aren't upset with their take. If they are it's because their own management has their hands deep in pockets, or just plain suck. Live Nation knows dam well who butters the bread.
The history of Live Nation is that it is the decedent of bill graham presents. You might want to go look at the history of bill. There is a statement about his funeral, and it having the longest lines of stretched black limos in SF history. It's probably true. Bill made everyone money, himself included as a "promoter" and every penny of that came from fans.
The music industry has been doing its own version of pay to win / loot boxes since the 70's. When they break up LN (if?) its just going to get worse as the greed is gonna just be right out in the open. The lesson of the last decade is that you dont need LN/TM to cover it up. Artist given choice will make tickets non transferable and just auction them off... the new starting bid will be the same as the current all in price.
It's greedy fucks all the way down.
P.S. As I have said elsewhere in this thread, I speak from having spent a few years working in the industry. Find someone who works in "music" like that and it's the same nonsense as game devs, long hours and shit money cause people are passionate...
> The lesson of the last decade is that you dont need LN/TM to cover it up. Artist given choice will make tickets non transferable and just auction them off... the new starting bid will be the same as the current all in price.
That's fine, though, and arguably better. Right now the consensus among concert-goers seems to be, "man, this is all expensive, but looks like I'm getting screwed by [TicketMaster | the venue]; I bet $ARTIST thinks this sucks too". For artists who want to charge an arm and a leg to see them perform live, pricing a lot of people out, that ire should be directed at the artists, where it truly belongs.
And maybe that drives some fans away, and that's what artists need to see happen. But I don't believe that all artists who play ball with LN/TM are greedy like that. Certainly some are, and maybe even most are. But those who are not... well, they should be able to play in huge venues across the country and charge less for admission if they want to.
Chris Brown is 1000 bucks too... (you can find that link with ease, and the funny blow back)
I know you're looking at that and thinking "these must not be that popular".
The concert industry has been harpooning whales since the 90's and the internet only made it more lucrative.
>> But I don't believe that all artists who play ball with LN/TM are greedy like that.
Touring, merch, licensing... These are the ways artists make money. Music is basically free. Price is a function of popularity, no one is going to leave money on the table, ever.
>> charge an arm and a leg to see them perform live, pricing a lot of people out ... be able to play in huge venues across the country and charge less for admission if they want to
Sometimes the prices are so dam high that you only even care about half the venue and then you paper over the rest... It's kind of common for a large venue to just get asses in seats and sell beer and tshrits if they can.
An artist might want to opt out of this, though. They might think, and reasonably so, that the optics of having affordable tickets - even if they make less overall - is better for their brand identity and long—term benefit.
That LiveNation has created a de facto system where they cannot opt out of their price setting is at the heart of the entire matter.
Affordable tickets requires a way to combat scalping, which in turn butts up against freedom to resell/transfer tickets after purchase. It's a hard game to win whenever scarcity and economics are involved.
And this is another area they're part of the problem. Not only do they have a resale platform, they've also been caught placing tickets directly on the resale market.
Current ticketmaster tickets are electronic and often can be resold only on their system (depending on what the artist/venue has chosen as a restriction). Of course their system could limit the resale prices of the ticket, to the original price or a set percentage above it. They already take a bite of each resale I believe.
They have already built the electronic ticketing and transfer system that would allow them to prevent resale of tickets at a profit, the system is done. They just choose not to use it that way (and I'd guess artists/labels/venus are in on this too -- what the ticketmaster system does make possible is for them all to take a bite of the scalped ticket resale price!)
Not only does their system make it possible, they teach their "partners" (scalpers) how to buy and sell more tickets, and the fees are usually even higher on those secondary sales, so this is very lucrative for tickermaster (and the scalpers).
afaik, scalpers will often be selling tickets that have been bought speculatively in large blocks during pre-sale or when sale starts. this is a whole very complex side industry in itself, and being able to get those large chunks of cash up-front/early is beneficial for the artists/promoters/venues for lots of reasons. obv. this doesn't really apply to a super popular artist who is going to sell out on the first day, but there are very few artists/performers who do that.
so. as mentioned above. it's a hard problem to solve. if you think about it purely as a market/exchange then it's not dissimilar to how market-makers, arbitrageurs and HFT systems keep the market "efficient".
yeah, as i understand it - i did a lot of research on this for a service i was building way back - these third parties (like scalpers) are useful because they actually find the "true" price of the tickets and, through the resale services, a good chunk of that extra money makes it back to the ticketing companies/promoters/artists. i wouldn't be at all surprised if a lot of these scalping operations are actually being run (secretly) by the ticketing companies and promoters themselves, or at least with their tacit approval and some revenue sharing.
so, it's a hard one to solve because it actually ends up generating more revenue for the promoters/venues and (sometimes) the artists. but the audience, who have the least power in the relationship, get screwed. well, my feeling is we/they get screwed, but many others would say this is "just capitalism".
Combatting scalping is the easiest thing ever. Just put the name of the attendee on each ticket and if you want to be nice you can have a buyback period until a certain date before the show, where the venue purchases back your ticket if you can't go.
The work of checking IDs is mostly done in US venues already, for 21+ drinking wristbands. It would have to be done differently, for sure, but a good portion of that labor is already being incurred.
More likely, the venues don't have much economic incentive, if any, to reduce ticket reselling and scalping.
nope, they would check like 20% to 30% of them. i’ve done work for a few non-profit performance organizations and this seems to be fairly effective in putting a large dent in reseller markets for non-transferable tickets.
resellers really don’t enjoy cc charge backs to pile up on their accounts.
Yes, absolutely. Adding an ID check to a ticket check and often a bag check and sometimes metal-detector wand check seems pretty minimal to me. Or have people scan their IDs themselves when they scan their tickets; pretty much every driver's license and state ID in the US has a barcode thing on the back. Of course have enough staff at the gates to deal with the exceptions or when things don't work right.
Regardless, this already happens: I went to a concert at Chase Center last year, and they were checking everyone's IDs, not even just a random sampling of them. When I went to EDC in Vegas last year, they were checking IDs at the shuttle stops on the strip. I believe they were only doing that for age verification, but if the ID is already out, that can easily turn into identity verification.
Why not? They check hand bags anyway. Even if you don't check everybody it is a huge deterrent to scalpers if the buyer can not be sure that they will be allowed in. Imagine paying for expensive tickets, travelling a long distance, paying for a hotel room etc. And then you're not getting in to see the show.
Radiohead does this, banning scalping and limiting prices/supply. It seems to work out pretty well with the fan base. May be due to the band having obsessive and largely left-wing fans
They have tried a bunch of methods like demand based pricing, ID verification, electronic tickets, and lotteries. I suspect these things only work a little and each has its own problem side-effects.
Bands with the clout and fans lined up down the block the day before ticket sales open (e.g. Radiohead, The Cure, Pearl Jam) can do these things, and I'm glad they do. For the vast majority of acts– even well-known ones– it's absolutely not an option.
I think pretty much any act popular enough to headline at a large LiveNation venue can do this. Not even all that is necessary: just ID verification. Require each ticket to be associated with a real person's name at the time of purchase (and the ticketing platform should make it easier for people to find tickets next to or at least near their friends when they have to buy in separate orders).
Tickets aren't transferable. Ticket purchasing platform has a marketplace where people can resell tickets to others if they can't attend, and sale price is capped at whatever they paid in the first place. (Or the ticket issuers can partner with something that already exists, like StubHub, and contractually require the price caps.)
Each attendee must present their ID to enter the event. Names must match, no exceptions. I don't love the idea that you can't anonymously attend a concert (by walking up to the ticket counter and paying in cash, assuming any large venues even have box offices anymore), but I think the benefits of this scheme for the majority of purchasers far outweigh that negative.
This isn't hard. It's almost as if someone in the chain likes scalpers...
Indeed, the problem would not be difficult for LiveNation to solve.
Those acts are still the minority of things they book. Within maybe 30 miles of where I live, there are probably 15 big venues that house huge acts like that, but hundreds of smaller clubs, event spaces, halls, theaters, etc that use LiveNation. I used to work at a bouncer at a little rock club with like a 250 person capacity and they used them for ticketing.
Most venues in NYC seem to use an app called dice for ticket distribution. You can only resell on the app and only at or below the original price. Not foolproof, but seems to work pretty well in nyc, but in a less populated area might be hard if people cant sell the tickets and start complaining.
You are correct, the ticket prices will be agreed between the promoter/venue (LN) and artist/manager via the booking agents.
The venue, often LN, will charge a base rate then everything else goes on top.
There are several other factors at play that lead to higher ticket prices which often comes down to the artist and its tour production being very expensive rather than pure greed
More often than not the deals are worked out on a 70/30 or 80/20 in favour of the artist and split after breaking even on most mutually agreed costs (ads etc), or a bigger artist flat fee which is risky for them.
Fire insurance in California is moving towards control by a government-mandated cartel. All the insurance companies have to take partial ownership of the California FAIR plan company, and they share in its profits.
For what it's worth, they refer to themselves as a "syndicate".
CalFAIR charges 2-3x market rate premiums (for similar houses in the same area insured by the companies that own CalFAIR -- this is on top of charging more due to risk), and then refuses to pay out when your house is damaged, engages in lowballing, etc, etc.
Since all the insurance companies that are "competing" against them own stakes in it, the moral hazard should be obvious. Predictably, CalFAIR's market share has been rapidly increasing in recent years. They're supposed to be temporary insurance of last resort, but they've climbed to over 3% market share.
You are right, but in in his "cartel", everyone was working for him. Kind of a monarchy. I feel these cartels are more of an actual oligarchy where each player has a separate role that gives it power instead of just reporting up to Pablo.
Taking the insurance example you have the "suppliers" (doctors, drug companies and device companies), the "venue" (hospital) and the "extractor" (insurer).
Similarly you have the "suppliers" (musicians), the "venue" (the venue I guess) and the "extractor" (Live Nation and Ticketmaster). No obvious mapping to the record labels, recording studios or (biggest of all) streamers but hopefully some similarities are present.
I feel like Escobar, the Sinaloa Cartel, etc, are much more top-down.
>In other words, the artists, venues, producers, and Ticketmaster are in cahoots to fleece fans for as much money as possible
yes, but they are in cahoots with the fans to fleece the fans. Fans are willing to pay big money to see these shows, that's who pays the high prices. If fans didn't pay the high prices, the prices would drop.
Your comment (the word fleece) suggests you are at least somewhat judgmental about "greed": this type of judgment is why bands try to pretend that they sell the tickets for a "fair" price, and that's what creates the 2ndary market, and that's what creates the kickbacks and the need for a scapegoat.
you expect to pay a high price for a Picasso at auction. You should expect also to pay a high price for sellout, SRO, line around the block shows too. Who should collect that money? fans who got in first? fake fans who pretended to be fans to get in first? People who are attracted by the arbitrage price differential? Or, I dunno, how about Picasso? The band.
The biggest fans in football, season ticket holders who slog through all the bad seasons, frequently sell their superbowl tickets when the price gets high enough. They'd rather have the money, that's the nature of money, and people.
Yes, but also, many of those venues ARE Ticketmaster. From the Ascend Ampitheatre in Nashville to the Gorge in Washington, Live Nation owns like 150 major and minor concert venues. They're often kicking back to themselves.
Yes, it seems like in 1985 Ticketmaster and the couple of big competitors they gobbled up (I recall there was at least one other called Bass) could justify their existence decently. The operated brick and mortar locations where you could buy tickets, as well as a call center where you could call in to buy tickets. Today though, arguably without their many tentacles like Live Nation that guarantee them a cut of everything, they have no moat at all. Oh gee, if only we could figure out how to charge credit cards, show a seat map for you to pick your seat, and print barcodes on paper / email a barcode to attendees. So yes, I would expect that relative to verticals where things require actual ingenuity or skill to do a good job, it would be easy for people who operate venues to either just roll their own ticketing systems, or contract with dozens of vendors who would compete on their value. Of course, venue owners who are not themselves part of Live Naton itself could do this today, but the gross agreements where ticketmaster inflates fees and splits them with everybody in order to gain an exclusivity contract makes this uncommon. The whole thing is so corrupt and greedy it's sickening.
"Ticketing. Our Ticketing segment is primarily an agency business that sells tickets for events on behalf of our clients and retains a fee, or “service charge”, for these services. We sell tickets for our events and also for third-party clients across multiple live event categories, providing ticketing services for leading arenas, stadiums, amphitheaters, music clubs, concert promoters, professional sports franchises and leagues, college sports teams, performing arts venues, museums and theaters. We sell tickets through websites, mobile apps, ticket outlets and telephone call centers. During the year ended December 31, 2015, we sold 69%, 21%, 7% and 3% of primary tickets through these channels, respectively. Our Ticketing segment also manages our online activities including enhancements to our websites and bundled product offerings. During 2015, our Ticketing business generated approximately $1.6 billion, or 22.6%, of our total revenue, which excludes the face value of tickets sold. Through all of our ticketing services, we sold 160 million tickets in 2015 on which we were paid fees for our services. In addition, approximately 297 million tickets in total were sold using our Ticketmaster systems, through season seat packages and our venue clients’ box offices, for which we do not receive a fee. Our ticketing sales are impacted by fluctuations in the availability of events for sale to the public, which may vary depending upon event scheduling by our clients. As ticket sales increase, related ticketing operating income generally increases as well."
$1.6b of revenue selling 297m tickets. $5.79 per ticket. So you are paying $20 fees on a ticket, who do you think gets that money if it isn't Ticketmaster?
Well something is going on. I used to go to concerts all the time when I was younger and they were far far cheaper than what they cost today even when accounting for inflation.
>Take away this dynamic, and the face price of tickets is going to go up, and the total price is unlikely to change substantially.
>Personally, I think this would still be a net plus for society. In order for market forces to work well, you need pricing transparency.
I agree: fair pricing is better than bullshit pricing with hidden fees and surcharges. It's the same with tipping at restaurants: it's better to just have the actual price printed clearly and advertised, and that's the price you pay, instead of advertising a lower price and then having to do mental math to figure out the real price at the register.
They aren’t just fleecing fans they’re also ripping off other participants in the market especially competitors. Matt Stoller has written a lot of detail about this.
It might have changed in the last 10 years, and it might be different in the USA, but in 2010 when I put on a large theatre production and had to use Ticketmaster, there was no way a ‘kickback’ was part of the equation.
Exactly the opposite, in fact. Did you know that Ticketmaster has two fees? One is the ‘outside’ fee that you, the punter, sees. So you think I’m getting $100 and you’re giving Ticketmaster another $10.
In fact there’s also an ‘inside’ fee that Ticketmaster charges me. So of that $100, they also take $10 from me.
Of course for this you get all sorts of services, right? Tools to manage seating, allocations, reservations, price varieties, and so on? Nope. Not a goddamned thing.
Concerts aren't a necessity. As much as Ticketmaster/LiveNation "fleece" fans, secondhand sellers a/k/a scalpers do it even more. The demand is there, if the prices were too high the tickets would not sell.
If you don't like what a concert ticket price costs, don't go.
Oh yeah. I remember Trent Reznor writing an angry social media post about this probably ten years ago, more or less explaining it all. Ticketmaster only sells a small portion of a show's tickets through their official website. Most go straight to "aftermarket" outlets that Ticketmaster indirectly controls, and artists know about this and take their share of the markup.
Yes, basically non-Apple headphones are pointless for iPhone owners now. Doesn't matter how much Bose or anyone improves their tech, the port they relied upon got removed. Apple has locked together iPhones and headphones.
I don't get the sense that third party headphones don't work just fine with iPhone, other than a seeming indication that iPhone users seem to think normal Bluetooth doesn't work well, which might indicate Apple has either not invested in their standard Bluetooth stack or at worst, actively degraded it.
But I'm doubtful of this, it seems more likely that some Apple users have an outdated view of how reliable standard Bluetooth actually are, even when paired with their iPhones.
Yes, there have been since 2007. Almost nobody used them until the jack got removed, because they don't work well. BT standard improved over the years, but not enough.
Vertical integration and competition are orthogonal. Vertical integration is when Apple improves upon Bluetooth with a proprietary enhancement to the standard. Competition is Pixel Buds advertising a similar feature set.
I would be curious how this compares to a more-or-less off-the-shelf text compression algorithm like gzip. My guess is that over the entire database, this would be more efficient than the OP's ad-hoc implementation or any alternative mentioned here.
Unlikely. Gzip and the like will do well with getting rid of the inherent redundancy of ascii coding but it's a general algorithm and can't take advantage of known structure.
`C is far removed from modern computer architectures: there have been 50 years of innovation since it was created in the 1970’s.`
Is there a C-like language that uses abstractions based on current ARM or x86 processors? i.e. something above assembly that learning would help us understand how these modern processors actually work?
What language would? Even if you directly write assembly the microcode or pipelining layers are not visible to you, its abstracted in hardware itself. In that sense I think accusing C of not being hardware friendly because these aspects are not exposed to it is nonsense. These are not exposed to even assembly language forget any other higher level language. Regarding parallel programming and GPUs I think a better case could be made for alternative abstractions.
My point wasn't that C wasn't hardware friendly. My point was that it doesn't teach you "how a computer really works". It teaches you a lower-level abstraction than Python does, but it's still an abstraction, and there's a ton of mechanisms at work that you can't see.
Of course. Even below assembly language there are many layers on today's computers. As you noted pipelining, microcode, branch prediction, etc there is a lot more below it. And further below one gets electronics and then quantum theory and so on. So its a matter of what abstraction one can safely ignore I think. And today I think we at least need to go to the level of that sub-assembly stuff if one wants to write anything that does not perform badly. I personally also feel whatever layer one usually works in, one should learn the layer immediately below at the very least. So yes I think we agree.
> And today I think we at least need to go to the level of that sub-assembly stuff if one wants to write anything that does not perform badly
You can write fast software today in assembly, C, C++, Rust, and languages like that. You don't need to go to the microcode level. The reason we have trouble with slow, bloated software today is because people don't do that, and instead use slower languages, like Python or JavaScript, using inefficient algorithms, with lots of potentially unnecessary dependencies that optimize for the general case, and not whatever specific problem the programmer wants to solve (which is often less efficient as well).
By sub-assembly level I meant we must have some knowledge at least of pipelining, branch prediction, caching etc at least regardless of your language choice which is to say its not a completely clean abstraction you can totally ignore and forget about. Layers underneath that are probably not so important.
Even if this is not a foolproof way to avoid flying on a 737 max, using it will provide a very _visible_ signal to the airlines. If they're losing ticket sales because people don't want to fly on a 737, the airlines will find a way to adapt. Even a marginal change of a few percentage points can shift a route from profitable to unprofitable.
Airbus is already outselling Boeing 2-1. If you're looking at a 5-10 year lead time anyways, they can expand production to eat further into Boeing's share if that's what the airlines demand.
Planes get swapped out last minute pretty often, its pretty much the only way to avoid full airline meltdowns every time one flight is 60 minutes late to take off. Hell, there was no huge meltdown in the US once the 737 MAX was grounded, twice. They just swap them out, the system knows how to do it efficiently
An evil (but working) way to bypass this once 737s are flying again, would be to put a different plane with similar layout on every flight, then swap to the 737 on the itinerary the day before
Different plane, different seat, is pretty aggressively baked into TOS
The history of which plane flew which route is public knowledge though. So sites like kayak can easily say 'this flight was an airbus 90% of the time over the last year'
They are selling transportation from location A to location B via an airplane. The specific airplane, assuming it has the features the customer paid for, is more of a technicality.
It's different when it's a deliberate conspiracy to mislead consumers, especially when that consumer is choosing services that advertise that a safe vehicle will be used.
If they just stopped showing what plane would be used on the route, maybe they'd get away with using 737-MAX series.
If they say 'it's a 737-800 don't worry about it' and swap in a max every time, or 'fly with us on an airbus' and bring in a boeing death-tube after a purposefully misleading advertisement of a different service...
Terms Of Service only gets you so far. It's not a fraud-dodge.
It's not fraud if it's in the Ts&Cs. But it is false advertising I suppose, if they advertise a flight on one aircraft _knowing_ that their plan is to swap it out, premeditation etc.
People exhibit abject apathy to these sorts of topics, lengthy Ts&Cs should be made illegal - edge cases that allow people to sue (in America I guess) companies for silly and stupid things should be dealt with by evolving the legal system, not with endless text nobody can or should have to read.
But even in an ideal no slippery Ts&Cs world, you'd still have to catch them making premeditated decisions to swap out equipment using that clause.
Traveling in a different vehicle than originally intended is not fraud. Rental car companies do this all the time.
Large countries without free market capitalism have much worse safety records for flying from a historical perspective.
To be clear, i’m referring to Russia and China.
In Russia they can sell you fake plastic cheese that catches fire, and you still have zero chance of winning a lawsuit. You compensation for wrongdoing or death will be minimal. So it’s more capitalist that US in this regard.
If I pay for beef, but you sell me pork, that’s fraud. If I pay for organic eggs, but you sell me ‘normal’ eggs, that’s fraud. Eggs are literally the same thing, but you can sell me the wrong airplane?
If you buy the airplane, you definitely get the airplane you bought. When you buy a ticket, you aren't buying an airplane, you're buying transportation on whatever airplane is most convenient for the airline
I don’t know the source or veracity but that’s deliveries vs new orders.
Planes being delivered this quarter were probably ordered before COVID hit in my understanding so any order differences would take a long time to show up in the delivery numbers
"Airbus led in terms of aircraft orders, with Reuters reporting earlier this month that the manufacturer was on track to hit an all-time year-end order record of over 1,800. Boeing's order numbers were a little further behind, with only about 1,200 net orders logged.
When it comes to aircraft delivery targets, Airbus again pulled ahead. According to the latest analysis from Reuters, the Toulouse-based manufacturer is set to come out on top, with over 720 jets projected to be delivered to customers by the end of the year. Boeing also trails in this category, with delivery targets only sitting around 500."
Orders and deliveries are two different thing. Orders taken today are for years in the future, and deliveries made today were taken as orders years ago. This is true from Cessna up to Boeing.
> using it will provide a very _visible_ signal to the airlines. If they're losing ticket sales
They’re not. And neither is Boeing. If someone using Kayak isn’t willing to contact their elected, they’re irrelevant. (Complaints might register if you’re a frequent flier who books through the airline and gives written feedback. But I haven’t seen evidence of that yet.)
Boeings stock price is down 18% this month. Sure it's not because of Kayak, this is simply another data point that consumers are wary of Boeing. Boeing is massively fucking up and even though procurement cycles are extremely long, it definitely will have an impact. They are a plane and rocket company that can't build planes or rockets
I hear Warren Buffet’s voice over my shoulder telling me “Boeing stock is on sale.” Boeing is a huge defense contractor that is never going away. Maybe this is the bottom of their current crisis and it is a good time to buy?
A stock falling prices doesn't mean it is cheap. Buffett sold J&J just because they changed management, and he probably wasn't confortable with the new bosses. They don't have any other know drawbacks, and if you read investment media each one of them has one theory.
OTOH Buffett has said many times that stocks related with flying are usually a bad investment. And even when he invest, he says that he doesn't know why he keep doing it, as he knows it's a mistake.
And finally, he usually says that he no longer buy "cheap companies to take a last puff of a cigar butt", but "great companies that are going to do great forever".
Now do the aggregate: bad management + air stock + company in decline = not cheap for Buffett. The small investor could cash a rebound if it happens, but a behemot like B&H is not interested.
Boeing is an institution. Boeing shareholders are not. If the problems are systemic, the government can put Boeing into bankruptcy to wipe the slate clean.
Sounds like a good time to buy it then. There's a 0% chance the government would let Boeing go down so it will rebound just like it did with the last 737 issue a few years ago.
> it will rebound just like it did with the last 737 issue a few years ago
I’m eyeballing the boeing 5Y stock graph and I’m not seeing that rebound. It was around USD 330 when the MCAS issue grounded them. Then it was riding above 300 until the march of 2020. Collapsed there presumably due to Covid and then the highest ever it climbed was last year december with USD 260.
It seems if you bought stock just after their grounding you are very much in the red with that to this day. So where is the rebound?
Lion Air 610 crashed October 29, 2018. BA closed at $357 that day. It continued to go down to $304 on December 17th 2018. By February 25 2019 it hit a high of $440. A month later Ethiopian Airlines 302 crashed sending BA down again. The larger issue beyond this was covid sending the stock plummeting so it didn't really have a chance to rebound after the affected 737 models were recertified and not grounded anymore.
But you're coming at this from a long term investing point of view. If you're day trading or swing trading (which is likely given it's an individual stock and buying individual stocks for a long term investment is rarely a good idea) then it presents an opportunity. Of course, nothing is a sure bet in the market but seeing something like Boeing down 18% can present a short term opportunity for speculators. Would I put BA in my retirement funds? Absolutely not. Would I try to swing trade BA in a case like this? There's a good chance.
Just because the government won't let Boeing go bankrupt doesn't mean Boeing shares will provide the exact same return to investors no matter what. An incident like this should reduce our expectations of how much Boeing will pay investors in dividends/buybacks, so the share price should be lower.
The goverment might try to give Boeing back from McDonnel/Chicago to Boeing. As it should have happened years ago already. It's critical infrastructure for them.
For that to be true, the whole Boeing fiasco would have to be a hoax, when it instead seems to be becoming a very concerning pattern.
I'm very happy to learn that JetBlue is AirBus-only in this thread. I already am an anxious flyer with a trip coming up in six months and it'd be a lie to say I wasn't considering just driving, even though that's statistically more dangerous, it's a situation where I have more perceived control.
> an anxious flyer with a trip coming up in six months and it'd be a lie to say I wasn't considering just driving
Sure. But someone travelling once in six months, and actively weighing flying versus driving, isn’t a market-moving customer.
I have no doubt some demand destruction is happening. But it’s not along frequent fliers. Airlines are clamouring to get their planes recertified because they know they’ll be filled.
I'm going to call BS on this. Airline passengers are willing to endure all manner of indignities just to shave a few bucks off their ticket price. I'll believe Boeing is in trouble after Spirit and Ryanair go out of business.
On the other hand, Kony is apparently still walking around free. So maybe the comparison is apt.
This Kayak filter is not new, it's been there for a few years (maybe they added more models, not sure, but you've been able to filter out the MAX planes since the crashes).
That's not going to do anything but create even more PR nightmare. If airlines sue Kayak, they'd generate a media storm which will further compel people to do it.
It's not hard to see what plane your flight is using. Super easy. Every booking site shows it.
I’m starting to treat general aviation as though it was 50 years ago: Very unsafe and expensive
My expectation is that its going to take a serious accident to get anything to change.
I’m unaware of a highly utilized yet significantly broken system (Tacoma Narrows anyone?) that was able to improve iteratively without catastrophic failure driving improvement (Space Shuttle)
Most human systems don’t seem to have the ability to build fourth order forecasting into system design across all individual and integrated components
The idea of a “factor of safety” seems to be just completely missing in most engineering systems because tolerances mean waste and shareholders won’t allow waste that doesn’t go into their pockets
Very unsafe? In the past 14 years there have been 72 fatalities involving US Air Carriers, out of around 250 million flight hours flown[1]. That’s fewer fatalities in 14 years than there are US motor vehicle fatalities in a single day (on average).
Humans are bad at statistics. For example the incident at three mile island in 1979 didn't kill anyone, but the accident crystallized anti-nuclear safety concerns among activists and the general public, and accelerated the decline of efforts to build new reactors.
Three mile island directly cost well over 1 billion in 1979 dollars (2+B today) just in terms of destroyed assets and initial cleanup costs. The wider impact was even more expensive.
Such a visible failure changed the risk/reward calculations which then hurt the nuclear industry quite a bit. We did keep building US nuclear reactors afterwards, but they were never that profitable in the first place making the industry very sensitive to disruption.
The problem as I see it is that the costs of Three Mile are acute and fairly direct. Whereas fossil fuel power may have even an even bigger cost (from the environmental impact), but as they are slow, chronic, and indirect, they’re easily overlooked.
Humans just seem to be disproportionately responsive to rare, acute events.
To "slow, chronic, and indirect", I would also add "spanning most of a human lifespan." For these kinds of things we often don't realize something is brand new as of our lifetime. Said in another way, if something changes in our life when we are 2, we will tend to think that thing was always that way, even though it is very recent.
An example, forest fires in the West (coast US). They have always been around. So, many say, nothing new here. Yet, we don't quite grok that they are 10x worse than 50 years ago [1]. Thus, if you look at it across multiple human lifetimes we can see there is a radical difference. Across one lifetime and it might not seem like it is so different.
Compare active reactors + reactors in construction during three mile island vs where nuclear production stabilized.
Things stabilizing like that is very suspect. It probably has to do with capacity factors and the long lead time, but I wouldn’t assume there’s no correlation.
Yeah, I'm not saying there's no correlation, just that you see the full-on halt kick in after Chernobyl. Which makes intuitive sense to me. Even though our reactors were very different from Chernobyl, the incident was so much more extreme and the distinctions were probably largely lost to the general public.
Wrong kind of disruption. If your profit margins are 0.5% then a tiny dip in demand, 2% spike in interest rates, or spike in steel costs etc can be devastating.
If you’re a software company with profit margins over 40% then you don’t care much about rent etc.
This question sort of answers itself, but why skirt the real concern, just add a "Chance of crashing" filter to the flight search? Bonus jobs for data scientists and takes the consumer out of the odds calculation.
the impact of violence vs other causes of death is similar, 9/11 killed 3K people and we went to war for 20 years and spent trillions as a result. Meanwhile 100K Americans died from opioids last year and the government does nothing
requiring events to kill anyone as evidence of danger of death is a foolish standard, obviously.
People are "bad at statistics" in the sense that the very real evidence coming from, e.g. 3 mile, is hard to bring into statistical models appropriately, not in the sense that there was no evidence there.
For Three Mile, indeed there is some disagreement on the long-term non-fatal health effects. That any causal effect is unclear does not mean it does not exist, but does suggest that, even if it does, it is likely small. (Admittedly, I have not done a thorough review of the data on this). Nevertheless, your point carries to the true comparison of nuclear power: fossil fuel power and its long-term economic and health impact.
For the airline risk example: US Airline Carriers in past 14 years: 268 serious injuries (same source as above). Depending on the year, that’s about the same or less than the number of road traffic related injuries in the US in just one hour (on average)[1].
>>I’m starting to treat general aviation as though it was 50 years ago: Very unsafe and expensive
50 years ago civilian aircraft deaths were, on average, 400% higher per year than now. You might want to rethink your comparison; it has never been safer to fly commercial airlines.
IIRC, less than 5 people have died in the USA in commercial airline crashes since 2010.
...and in this case provably wrong - there have been (in the USA) just 2 deaths, in all of commercial aviation, since the 737-max was introduced in 2015 - thats 2 deaths in 9 years.
In the 9 years before (2014 back to 2006) that there were ~100 deaths, so 5000% higher deaths in the 9 years before the 737Max was introduced - and even that is very, very low historically.
(and for the record, not claiming the 737Max is directly responsible for those lower deaths, just that in general - and across the board - aviation has never been safer than it is now).
In 2015 and 2016 there were 0 deliveries of 737 Max's. They were also grounded for a good part of 2019 and you are only counting one country, so your statistics should be revised.
Maybe a better way to state my position is that, while it is currently the safest time to fly, I expect regression to the mean for airline safety over the next several decades. To such a degree that the increase in fatality risk is going to go up not down
Everyone on the plane has to die in a way that the plurality of citizens are horrified enough that they can put public pressure on a public figure powerful enough to force structural change
This is the same idea as the cynical idea of “taking advantage of a crisis”
What I’m not saying here is that this is what should happen or that this is how things should happen in a normative way. I’m simply describing that humans make progress almost exclusively in response to disaster rather than proactively preventing it.
> I’m starting to treat general aviation as though it was 50 years ago: Very unsafe and expensive
General aviation* is expensive and dramatically less safe than commercial aviation. I'm not sure what that has to do with Kayak's offering model-filtering in their UI (Kayak is selling commercial aviation tickets, which has nothing to do with general aviation).
Commercial aviation is incredibly save. Yes there are accidents, but there are accidents in every human system. Commercial aviation is the safest way to travel even with all the mistakes Boeing has been making lately.
You are far more likely to die in a car crash than in a plane.
I wonder how this compares with just 3D printing in concrete, like Icon. It seems a little bit like putting a round peg into a square hole to have a robot fastidiously recreate a building technique designed around humans, whereas doing it in a way optimized for robots can be easier and more flexible. Kinda how roombas don't vacuum like a human.
I remember I bought a roomba (first model years ago), and it didn't vacuum at all. it was basically for picking up crumbs from (some of the) the kitchen floor.
So, there is a defensible reason for this carve-out.
For generations now, video game consoles have had very aggressive cryptographic pairing of parts, done in the name of securing the hardware against hacking by the console owner. This is done to prevent mods to enable cheating and piracy. Given that consoles are often sold at a loss with profits recouped on game sales, there's a justification for this.
Providing replacement parts for game consoles would also require tools to re-pair the replacement parts. If these tools need to be provided to independent repair shops, there's approximately a 100 % chance of them getting leaked and destroying the security of the console.
I'm not going to say that this is a good or a bad thing. I'm just pointing out that there's a real reason for lawmakers to treat game consoles different than phones or computers, and that it isn't necessarily a sign of corruption.
This is also done for iPhones, which have not been exempted.
The "security" of the console against "unauthorized" software is arguably against the public interest. Is it really to the customer's benefit to exclude software providers from the market? Haven't we been round this with app store discourse?
> consoles are often sold at a loss with profits recouped on game sales
The purpose of gaming consoles is to play games, and allowing cheating software on them ruins the experience for others. Consoles are not general purpose computers, they have a specific use which is gaming, and it is reasonable to protect the fairness required to have a good experience when using it in the way it was intended to be used.
Phones are not general purpose computers, they have a specific use which is to communicate with people over a distance.
See?
But you can in fact turn it around, because both phones and games consoles are in fact general purpose computers that are able to execute any program, before the arbitrary limitations are imposed on them by the manufacturers.
My point is that it is normal for special purpose devices to be regulated in such a way that prioritizes their primary purpose. And this is true for smartphones. The parts of your phone that must comply with telecom regulatory standards are locked down in black boxes separate from the main system.
The problem is this doesn't prioritize their primary purpose. It ensures that the device will simply stop functioning within a relatively short time frame. This sort of crypto-locking of parts makes them impossible to fulfill their primary purpose when a part fails and the manufacturer won't sell a replacement part. It's unacceptable to brick devices in the name of cheat defense.
I disagree. If it is not playable due to the manufacturing failing to prevent cheating, there is no need to replace parts on it, as it would be broken either way. A fair playing field is essential part of a functional game.
If the immobilizer on your car fails, it will brick your car too. The solution isn't to prohibit immobilizers and shrug our shoulders at car thieves, it is to require manufacturers to provide parts. Which we have long done for cars in the US.
TL;DR: Don't prohibits locks that protect consumers just because the lock could need maintenance. Require the manufacturer to provide parts for the lock.
I have a Nintendo Switch, I've literally never used it to play a game where cheating is a concern. Cheating in games is not a crime and it's not worth bricking devices to avoid.
I'm glad your experience has been fine. That doesn't mean that everyone has the same experience. Cheating in games can easily become criminal, and people have been arrested for doing so. Even though cheaters are often not prosecuted, these activities can often amount to fraud or hacking.
You don't need to lock down a console and prevent "unauthorized software installs" to prevent cheating. You do what game developers have been doing on PCs for years: validate all of the player's actions on the server, look for players with suspicious patterns of activity then ban them.
Behavior analysis is one approach used on PC games, and it has varying degrees of success. There are weaknesses to this approach and it tends to be a cat-and-mouse game of cheat developers adding fuzzing and anti-cheat developers adjusting their behavior analysis. Visit forums for games that use this kind of anti-cheat and you'll see people complaining about cheaters.
More popular games have shifted towards anti-cheat systems that run at ring zero and prevent you from playing the game unless it is happy with everything running on your system.
This is correct to be honest. rooting your phone doesn't ruin other peoples phone experience unless you perform actually illegal conduct perhaps (maybe some hacks or w/e?). Cheating in a game is not illegal, so companies need to take it upon themselves to prevent it. This is honestly fairly logical. it does not at all compare to PC or Phones.
And when people "root their phone" they are just modifying part of the device. The baseband is closed source and illegal/impossible to modify in order to protect the network and spectrum.
Some of us do get pretty close and modify stuff like EFS to enable/disable functions (voNR) and enable bands that were present but not legal at the time the device was certified. In US, band 77 was disabled on many devices but later became legal to use. The manufacturers didn't want to pay for the recertification but the device is capable otherwise. We also sometimes add band combinations (for carrier aggregation) that the manufacturer missed.
AFAIK, it's still true for Sony/Microsoft but hasn't been true with Nintendo for a while, I think since the Gamecube (when they stopped trying to play the performance game).
Why must the government pass laws to protect the specific business model of exactly 3 mega corporations, a business model which harms consumers and harms competition?
The DMCA exception for consoles is the same thing. The government is just taking these companies word for it, and harming everyone else. If Playstation/Xbox/Nintendo can’t survive without these handouts from the government, then why should they? It’s not like game consoles are a necessity. The free market is what should decide whether a business model succeeds or not.
And regarding privacy, that’s bs. If consoles somehow become overrun with piracy, then publishers can just move their games to other platforms. PC is much easier to pirate on, is in general used by more tech savvy people, and it doesn’t have a rampant piracy problem. Steam wouldn’t be as successful as it is otherwise.
US law in that area looks more at consumer harm, not incidental harm to other companies, IIRC. There's a separate way to get in trouble here around predatory pricing, but I think that's more complicated (you have to be doing it specifically to drive people out of business). It depends on what the rest of the market does. See https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
Specifically
> Pricing below a competitor's costs occurs in many competitive markets and generally does not violate the antitrust laws. Sometimes the low-pricing firm is simply more efficient. Pricing below your own costs is also not a violation of the law unless it is part of a strategy to eliminate competitors, and when that strategy has a dangerous probability of creating a monopoly for the discounting firm so that it can raise prices far into the future and recoup its losses.
So
> Is it okay because Sony/MS don't raise prices?
Yes exactly this.
See also:
Printers sold below cost with expensive ink refills.
E-readers, often
Razors for shaving - the base or chassis or whatever you call it is often sold below cost.
No problem, it's a good question, and it only works that way because of the particulars of US law. It differs for other countries, or even within the same country over time (the US's consumer focus was less strong in earlier years).
The consoles-are-sold-at-a-loss explanation has always seemed like an extraordinarily week argument for giving Microsoft and Sony a pass on bad behavior.
Their consoles may be sold at a loss at launch, but I don't know of any console hardware that wasn't net profitable over it's lifetime with the possible exception of the XBox with the ring-of-death problem.
42488.2.f already mentions limitations in the bill to prevent overriding anti-theft.
They could have extended that to include anti-piracy or anti-cheat or cryptographic pairing, but they didn't. They created a specific carve out for video game consoles and not for those other things you mentioned.
When the government uses words generically to define its compelling interest to regulate, they are usually sincere. When the government uses words to protect an industry explicitly, they usually have been bought.
I don’t see how it’s anticompetitive: any startup trying to get into the space is going to be making the case for product-market fit in terms of things like subscriptions and selling access to developers. I’d think a one-time per customer console sale at a loss would be one of the easier expenditures to justify to investors.
