On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 06:55:59AM +0000, James Harper wrote:
What we had was a race to the bottom and something needed to be done.
and one of the worst things about a race to the bottom is the affect it has on quality over the entire market, especially when the average purchaser has no idea how to reliably distinguish between good and bad products. this leads to what is known as a Lemon Market[1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons in short, the bad drives out the good. craig ps: Information Asymmetry[2] is also why supermarkets, petrol stations etc were so vehemently against the proposed govt price monitoring web sites a few years back. a significant part of their profits comes from exploiting their customers' ignorance. Anything that informs the customer will undermine their profits. I suspect it's also a big part of the reason why the supermarkets' online shopping sites often have very different prices to the prices in the shops. partly to prevent shoppers from comparison shopping via the web, and partly to exploit the online shoppers' ignorance of the actual price in the local shop. [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>