So you’re
the proud parent of a beautiful, inquisitive 15 year old daughter. How sweet.
You learn over the dinner table that she has a boyfriend. Oh no! So you kindly
ask the name of said boyfriend, then immediately call the police accusing the
unknown young man of raping your daughter. Because that’s the best way to make
sure he never, ever rapes her. Right? Right? Yeah, didn’t think so.
So here we
have this big business, Amazon, accused of being the nastiest thing to come
along in decades. Monopoly! Monopoly! Death to Amazon! Because it’s going to
get too big soon and it will destroy the world. Might as well curtail its power
now so we won’t have to do it later. Right? Right?
The problem
with a business like Amazon(or Netflix, or Google) is that we don’t really know
where this IT market is going to end up. We’re in the infancy stage of a
massive overhaul of the way we do business: with immaterial goods constructed mostly of knowledge, maybe the
old paradigms of governement intervention isn’t up to par in dealing with this
new high tech world. Add to that the slow decline of the technologically-inept
and the rise of the mulit-tasking nerd and there’s no way to predict where
we’ll end up. Or if Amazon and it’s likeminded business endeavors will be good
for the world or not. The only thing we know is we don’t know.
What we
need to do is wait for the market to reach maturity, to stabilize at a point
where we can study the impact of the new world order. Then we can ask if the
governement should intervene. Not before. Because if we act now we may end up
doing more harm than good, end up having to fix something that wasn’t broken in
the first place. The marketplace is fluid, it will never be too late to change
the rules later if we realize the marketplace is at the wrong equilibrium
point. Wait and see.
Get to know
the kid, and trust that your daughter is wise enough to chose a good boyfriend.
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