The problem arises when the bad tech crowds the good tech out of the market altogether.
I would like to have a smartphone that doesn't spy on me. I can't, because nobody makes one. So my personal preference doesn't matter; my only choice is between either accepting the spying, or not having a smartphone at all.
Now I get to look forward to enjoying this exact same dilemma when I buy furniture! Hooray.
It's an open source operating system... what compromises are you suggesting? Maybe the compromise is that they don't sell Russian info out to American interests.
> The problem arises when the bad tech crowds the good tech out of the market altogether.
That's not possible in normal market dynamics. When only shitty products are available, someone will start competing at the high end.
The reason it doesn't, and won't, happen with smartphones is because the telcos have [government granted] legal monopolies. And they function as government bureaus. Look up what happened to the CEO of Quest. [1]
It is not possible in ideal market dynamics where both perfect competition and the rational choice model hold, but where people are not -- contrary to the rational choice model -- perfectly knowledge about the actual utilities that they will individually realize from different market alternatives before making transaction decisions, its quite possible for bad-but-well-marketed-to-create-the-illusion-of-quality products to crowd out actually better products.
> If you pay attention to the world around you, you see that time after time, better products win out over worse ones.
Yes, lots of real, normal markets are reasonably well approximated by the rational choice model, even though its quite obvious that it is not literally accurate. That's one reason why its an important model.
Lots of real, normal markets are not reasonably well approximated by the rational choice model, and the elements of the model that are obviously literally false, and the degree to which reality deviates from them in the particular market, are pretty good starting points for understanding why that is the case.
"Normal markets" and "Econ 101 simplifications" aren't the same thing.
I would like to have a smartphone that doesn't spy on me. I can't, because nobody makes one. So my personal preference doesn't matter; my only choice is between either accepting the spying, or not having a smartphone at all.
Now I get to look forward to enjoying this exact same dilemma when I buy furniture! Hooray.