> Devil's advocate, walls and the enablement of taxation
Sure. I wasn't making a case that taxation at the wall is bad, but that it has the capability to be bad. We use regulation in (mostly) free markets to greater or lesser success to steer the markets in some manner. If you accept that pure capitalism doesn't necessarily yield an optimally performing system when people are involved, then that ability to influence the market is a useful capability, especially when applied judiciously. A blanket rate isn't necessarily the most efficient form of that, but it is a way to raise revenue.
> In a world where all phones are loosely controlled Android derivates
I think you've already stacked the starting conditions to the point where it's not really worthwhile to consider. That situation would be ripe for disruption in some manner, because I think it's inherently unstable. All it takes is a small niche market for alternatives that do make choices based on privacy, or security, and events that spur interest in those topics, and the larger population of providers will need to respond appropriately or risk ceding a increasingly large portion of the market to those that do.
I think the outcome of the first generation of smartphone OS's has (surprisingly for me at least) shown that there's really only room for a handful of players (Android/AChina, iOS) with sufficient numbers of users to be self-sustaining.
As you note, not sure a unipolar outcome would ever be stable enough to have persisted, but I wouldn't have expected a bipolar arrangement either. And I can imagine a market structure that would have depressed manufacturer profits far enough so as to preclude serious R&D / innovation on their parts.
You know, it's common enough to have one dominant player in a marker, a small few chasing players, and then a bunch of very niche players that I'm there's a lot of economic theory behind it that I'm unaware of. It probably relies quite a bit on how invested in the product you are once you've decided on it, but there are plenty of examples throughout history[1],
Sure. I wasn't making a case that taxation at the wall is bad, but that it has the capability to be bad. We use regulation in (mostly) free markets to greater or lesser success to steer the markets in some manner. If you accept that pure capitalism doesn't necessarily yield an optimally performing system when people are involved, then that ability to influence the market is a useful capability, especially when applied judiciously. A blanket rate isn't necessarily the most efficient form of that, but it is a way to raise revenue.
> In a world where all phones are loosely controlled Android derivates
I think you've already stacked the starting conditions to the point where it's not really worthwhile to consider. That situation would be ripe for disruption in some manner, because I think it's inherently unstable. All it takes is a small niche market for alternatives that do make choices based on privacy, or security, and events that spur interest in those topics, and the larger population of providers will need to respond appropriately or risk ceding a increasingly large portion of the market to those that do.