From: "Perry E. Metzger" <pmetzger@lehman.com>
Date: Thu, 11 Nov 93 11:59:12 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Should we oppose the
In-Reply-To: <199311111927.AA06278@eff.org>
Message-ID: <9311111954.AA28183@snark.lehman.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Mike Godwin says:
> It's always a mistake to confuse technical feasibility for competition.
> What's to prevent the dominant one or two providers (TPC and Cellular,
> let's say) from closing out the others by refusing to be interoperable?

Why did virtually all the railroads in the northern U.S. use the same
rail gauge BEFORE regulation of the railroads?

Why do most of the commercial internet providers (except for the
government subsidized ANS) agree to exchange packets with each other
freely?

Why do open standards do better in the market than closed standards?

The answer is "its in their interest to cooperate, thats why."

There was actually a really nice article in Forbes recently on game
theory and competition vs. cooperation...

Perry