March 4, 2022

s11e08: How Much Should You Own, Anyway?

0.0 Context setting

It's Friday, March 4th 2022. I started the day with less screaming than usual, and also a very nice call with a friend which reminded me: hey, I should do that more often. Interacting with other people who are stimulating and interesting and to whom I can also be stimulating and interesting produces a good feeling! Also totally not transactional.

One single thing today. Let's get on with it:

1.0 Some things that caught my attention

Lately, people¹ who have lots of money and own things have been buying people who make things and the whole situation feels like it's getting increasingly out of hand.

At the beginning of the year, Microsoft, a company that wanted to put a computer on every desk and in every home (and, in a way, got what it wanted because you can generally put your phone on whatever desk want), bought Activision Blizzard, one of the world's biggest videogame companies. The kind of people who play videogames³ got super stressed out about this because Microsoft makes a console called the XBox and owns an operating system called Windows, and until now, the prospect of Activision Blizzard releasing Call of Duty: The Calls Keep Coming From Inside The House And The Duty Never Stops only for XBox and Windows platforms were nil, because of course you'd always be able to answer the call of duty on, say, a PlayStation.

But that is not how the world works now. The way the world works now is that it is increasingly clear that money controls (it has always been so, but now it's, well, technology has helped with that, let's say) and that computers are quite good at helping with control.

Microsoft buying Activision is what a bunch of tech people would call reinforcing their competitive moat (reinforcing? Digging a deeper moat? Getting some of those excavators to dig it deeper and then just for the potentially apocryphal frivolity and sheer carelessness of it, discarding the excavator underground, in the manner of the extravagant downwards expansion of luxury property in London?). The reinforcement is simple: if, in the future, you want to answer the latest call of duty, then it's Microsoft's decision, absent any legislation, say, as to whether you will need to answer that call on a Microsoft-owned or operated or controlled platform.

Right now, you have a choice. Not, admittedly, a very large one, but you do have a choice between... three platforms.

Microsoft's attempted (subject to regulatory approval, etc) $68.7 billion Activision acquisition this year was on the heels of their 2020 acquisition of ZeniMax Media, another videogame publisher, for $7.5 billion in cash, or around 0.2 ETH or whatever.

So there is clearly A Plan here. (You'd hope so, otherwise someone is just spending a lot of money for arbitrary reasons).

This content acquisition to reinforce a digital platform is not a new play. It's why people say Content is King and why television shows are exclusive to networks, although in that day and age it was because the content was monetized through advertising, and these days, the content is monetized through direct subscription fees and then there's probably advertising and data as icing on the cake or on some MBA's offensive slideware as "future value streams".

So this is just like Spotify making Joe Rogan an exclusive podcast, or Substack making whoever's been cancelled an exclusive, by throwing large amounts of money at them.

But through an accident of history, after Disney bought Marvel, we could (can!) still buy DVDs and BluRays and whatever (even though DRM'd up, but offline DRM, at that) and use them on whatever player and not have to pay a subscription to Disney for access via Disney+. It's still possible, albeit in that DRM'd sense, to "own" media.

But it doesn't have to be: again, there are no regulations preventing the gating and prescription of access to media. Sure there in theory are regulations preventing industry consolidation and some general sop to antitrust and competition in the US, or it changes at the speed of administration. Potentially. Or Congress. So, let's say "not at a very fast rate". As far as I'm aware, there's no law saying Disney couldn't just stop selling DVDs and BluRays and whatever and just say, well, you want to watch that film again? It's on Disney+.

It would be dumb.

But, you know. It might not be dumb for too long.

So then in the videogame space, Sony has "no choice" but to act and make its own videogame publisher acquisition in response because there's no regulation or law right no in an appreciable enough market preventing Microsoft from just... not publishing or making available The Call, It Continues, And It's Dutiful on Sony's next console. So Sony should really make sure there are enough good reasons for you to drop $400 on whatever hardware they come out with next.

Unless, of course, The Cloud! Because Microsoft has transcended physical hardware: they don't need you to buy a console or a Windows PC anymore, they can just stream games to you over TCP/IP or, I don't know, do people still use UDP? Who knows. But anyway, sufficiently advanced networking is indistinguishable from local compute and storage. So instead you subscribe to Xbox Games Anywhere or Microsoft Games Anywhere or whatever it's called these days and, in theory, all Microsoft has to say is "well Sony, you should've just made an open accessible Web Browser on PlayStation 6, and people could still play their games, it's got nothing to do with us, you control your platform."

Which is where we are with Apple. But, absent Apple TV and Apple Arcade (and less so the latter), Apple aren't going in for content exclusives, at least not in the app space. I mean, they'd like to, but there's no real place where Apple are buying developers and saying "oh, the only place you can get this is on Apple hardware" and there are no alternatives. I suppose I'm actually wrong in that, in that the direct comparison is Apple have been making and investing billions in exclusive video content. But less so music. Anyway!

So my question is this. Society gets to decide, through, for example, in theory the exercise of representative democracy to which a group of representatives are delegated the power to set laws and regulations how much exclusive media a platform is allowed to own or even a concept like should media be platform exclusive or how long should media be platform exclusive for which in some ways is also, and somewhat horrifyingly copyright is digital platform exclusivity, actually in which case haha we're fucked.

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Well then. That was... about 20 minutes. Which nets out at around 60wpm?

Again, not really sticking to my 15 minute rule. Need to try to hold to that better.

It's Friday! How are you doing? How was your week?

Best,

Dan