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Comment Niggle: one polices one's monopolies and crooks (Score 1) 347

Actually one "polices" them rather than "regulating" them. It's called the "police power of the state", and refers to a lot more than the cops. Anything that gets you dragged in front of a magistrate or board who can punish you is policing

Regulation is a technical term for bylaw-like legislation, is misleading as heck, and historically is a term that lots of people in the 'States and Canada viscerally hate.

Comment Re:Isn't this classic anti-trust fodder (Score 1) 211

My publisher has such a site and sells DAISY, ePub, Mobi and PDF directly. They cannot sell them via Amazon, however. The Amazon site sells only a kindle-specific variant.

The fact that someone as major as O'Reilly has to deal with Amazon, at a price disadvantage and with significant limitations on what they're allowed to sell is typical of a monopoly, or an oligopoly with one leading member and the others doing price- and policy-following.

Monopolies are barely legal in Canada (where I am), but oligopolies and price-following are winked at. Very occasionally the government or courts will whack a leading oligopolist, but only if they are enraging the whole cell-phone-using population. Arguably they're a criminal conspiracy in restraint of trade, but as they only communicate their evil plans with each via press releases, the "secret" part of conspiracy is technically absent (;-))

Comment Re:Not illegal (Score 1) 218

The US used to have such laws, having suffered from significant monopoly problems in the past. It may be illegal in Canada, but it's arguably illegal everywhere else. If you sell houses in Chatham, you can't refuse to sell a house built by Bill Green, nor refuse to sell a house to Chan Hin Poon, even if you think Bill is an idiot and you hate anyone Chinese (;-))

Nor can you ask Bill for a kickback.

Comment Re:same old 1980s service on a new pole, sure (Score 1) 238

The approvals are for "add a new wire to all the poles in East Bumsquat county, with component sizes the same or smaller that standard F", rather than approval for houses. They're issued to companies who pull and maintain the wires and pay fees according to another preapproved schedule for large areas, typically a county or a region like "the south shore of Nova Scotia". If you want to pay a different fee, that takes a meeting. And, as I said, the original approvals took months of boring meetings, there and in Ontario.

Comment Re:Hedge (Score 2) 238

Someone had to bootstrap it, and Google stepped up, for their own normal benefit. In other locations, and after some years in the current ones, Google can offer to hand the physical fibre and the things it hooks to, to the local utility company. That moves the fibre itself into a being a common carrier, and probably a regulated monopoly if the local laws require.

Comment Cisco s moving to Toronto, as previously announced (Score 1) 297

Waterloo and Ottawa have more computer scientists. but Tranna has the manufacturing infrastructure, so Cisco's announced that they're moving significant parts of the company there. The first phase is $100 million, out of a $4-billion investment in Ontario. and roughly 1,700 jobs. See http://www.theglobeandmail.com...

Besides, many people fear CSE less than they do the NSA. After all, Canada's only been caught spying on Brazil, while the US was found spying on everyone on the planet (;-))

Comment So A/B test it and let the users decide! (Score 2) 406

Let the default download of a new firefox randonly select either with- or without-DRM. Cound the number of times the same user goes back and selects a non-default browser from a list that explicitly says whether they have DRM or not.

Done well, no-one will even notice.

In this experiment, I expect the null hypothesis will be "no-one cares", and will win (:-))

Comment Re:Ross Anderson ++ (Score 1) 370

For one, legal publishers.

Lexis Nexis and Westlaw are massive special-purpose search engines dealing in exactly this kind of data: court reports. Lexis Nexis is also well-known as a newspaper/magazine search engine.

Imagine a lawyer in the UK trying to refer to a classic interpretation and discovering the case was no longer reported, as from the point of view of one of the participants, it was "no longer relevant".

In non-EU countries, it if was a case about a minor, the page would have the names removed. Similarly, if a participant had received a pardon, they could apply to the court to remove their name from the published report. The original report would be available, of course, to lawyers willing to agree to confidentiality controls.

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