On Friday, June 14, 2002, at 07:10 , Curt Sampson wrote:
> There is indeed doubt that having completely unregulated and
> unrestrained markets and competition is always a good thing. If this
> is not what you're proposing, you should indicate what restraints and
> regulations are acceptable, and what restraints and regulations are not.
There is a big difference between regulation by an independent
regulatory authority with a public mandate, accountable to the public
under clear legislation on the one side and a protectionist government
leaving that "regulation" to a near-monopolist.
The former is employed in order to foster competition by way of creating
and watching over an environment in which all market participants have a
fair chance.
The latter is employed in order to keep competition at bay and assist
the the near-monopolist to keep the lead by way of creating an
environment where there is a deliberate imbalance in favour of one
participant. Japan has deliberately created such an environment.
> Straw man. My opinion is that *sometimes* protectionism is bad,
> and hurts far more than it has any hope of helping. Sometimes not.
> So your ability find examples of cases where it has hurt really
> doesn't affect my argument at all.
Fair enough. Examples are just examples.
> It is not a given that, had there been no protectionism, Japanese
> handset manufacturers would be "up there with Nokia and Samsung."
No guarantees there of course, but Japanese companies have traditionally
done very well where they have been exposed to international
competition. It is very likely that most Japanese manufacturers would
have done at least as well as the Koreans or the Germans.
> There is also the possibility that they simply would not exist at
> all, having been driven out of business by the other manufacturers.
A few of them ... quite possible ... but companies for which this holds
true, it is a waste of resources to let them continue to be in that
market and thereby divert valuable resources away from doing something
they are better at doing ... and more importantly diverting resources
away from other companies who are good at competing.
Allowing bad competitors to stay in markets they are no good at can only
weaken the entire industry.
> Or there's the possibility that the lack of protectionism would
> have given us a phone system like that in Europe or the U.S., and
> these manufacturers would still be producing blank-and-white,
> text-only phones with no e-mail, web, Java, GPS, or cameras, and
> we'd be exchanging messages via SMS. Certainly in this scenario
> the Japanese consumers would be far worse off than now.
Quite possibly the opposite would be the case. In most consumer
electronics industries, Japanese manufacturers have traditionally taken
the lead with extra features or making things smaller etc. Japanese
innovation would have been based on either CDMA or GSM giving many of
those innovations a chance to influence and shape the CDMA and GSM
standards.
The benefit of those standards is that there is no single market player
who owns the specification and put their own interest before common
interest.
One could argue that one of the reasons why GSM did better than CDMA (at
least outside of Europe) is that a significant part of IS-95, the air
interface is owned by Qualcomm.
>> Besides, one may argue what is of greater value, the gimmicks you
>> described or the competitiveness of the Japanese industry in
>> international markets.
>
> From my point of view, the gimmicks I describe, certainly. Probably
> from the point of view of a lot of other Japanese, too.
The word is "arguably" not "certainly" ;-)
regards
benjamin
Received on Fri Jun 14 14:01:43 2002