Before we get into the meat of the argument, you need to realize that there's a difference between trade regulation and price regulation. I haven't mentioned price regulation one single time. Trade regulation means
enacting and enforcing laws ensuring that trade is fair. Price regulation means
determining fixed prices or price ranges for a product or group of products. These are fundamentally different concepts. Stop confusing them, please.
-You can repeat "we need effective regulation" until you are blue in the face, the fact is regulation is, more often then not, ineffective, bloated, and expensive. Thousands of years have proven that millions of times over.
Sorry, but are you comparing our current society to... Ancient Egypt? Or Edo-era Japan? Medieval Scotland? Or something? History beyond the last few decades teaches us nothing much about the possibility of effective and fair regulation, as the possibilities of oversight, enforcement and transparency of such a practice today are
radically different from even the 1980s. That argument simply isn't applicable.
Not to mention that economic theory (unless you believe the thoroughly disproven drivel Milton Friedman and his successors spout) is entirely clear that rules and enforcement of said rules are fundamental requirements of a functioning economic system.
-You say the FCC is useless, yet you think your hypothetical regulation on GPU pricing would somehow NOT be just as worthless? That it will be immune to chip makers lobbying them to make the market favor them over the customer, like we see with the FCC, the FDA, ece.
Given that the current sorry state of US regulation and oversight is caused by decades of active deconstruction by neoliberalists (oh, sorry, I mean "small-government democrats/republicans" - yeah, neoliberals love their euphemisms too), yes, I do. It really wouldn't be hard to implement a system more effective and more tamper-proof than current US regulatory agencies. One might start by having someone who doesn't hate fair regulation designing it - that's likely to help quite a bit.
-Such regulation would also be highly politicized, see the FCC or any federal body at the moment. Believe it or not, many people do NOT want such politics involved in buying video cards. You claim I am paranoid about government control when you are calling for international regulation on frivolous media consumption devices, bringing in government into something they do not need to be in just because you dont like the higher prices of the current market, all while claiming thsi will bring about the use of anti monopoly laws that you claim the US never uses (hello, Ma Bell? did you forget how disastrously the ma bell split went for us in the end? Are you not familiar with the very ISPs you claim need regulation, or did you forget we used anti monopoly laws on them already?)
Regulation has to be politicised, as that's how you ensure democratic control of it. What shouldn't happen, and causes trouble, is the current climate where a political movement has managed to widely sell the idea that any and all regulation is evil/unfair/impossible/all three, which is both objectively untrue and an absurd ideological leap. Heck, even Nixon believed in regulation - just less thanthere was at the time. Disagreement on the amount and form of regulation is healthy, as we don't have perfect solutions for problems like this, and disagreement leads to new solutions and ultimately better ones. Disagreement in the form of saying "any attempt at fixing this problem is doomed and also tantamount to tyranny" (not saying you do this, just neoliberals in general, especially on the US right wing) is fundamentally unproductive, and seeing how it's based on soundly disproven economic theory, it's also quite objectively bad for everyone involved.
As for the failure of the split of AT&T, the issue there was lack of follow-through and essentially wholesale abandonment of regulating the market after the split (such as allowing "competitors" to split the market among themselves geographically, which - surprise! - didn't lead to more competition), not the split itself. If you believe in "free markets", then you must agree that competition is healthy for markets (as a monopoly is fundamentally unfree), and thus you must also agree that splitting up monopolies is good for markets. Otherwise, your stance is logically incongruous, and you really ought to look into that.
-And then you go an pull out "but but but AMD was unfairly marginalized by intel and nvidia bribing! ITS NOT AMDS FAULT!". AMD overpayed for ATI by over 2 BILLION DOLLARS. That would have bought a LOT of CPU and GPU development. AMD sat on their laurels with athlon 64, and when core 2 came out, it took AMD over 2 YEARS to respond, and the chip they created wasnt as fast as core 2.
You know when AMD finally released a proper core 2 competitor? 2009. three YEARS later. Perhaps if AMD hadnt overspent by 2 BILLION dollars in 2006, they could have competed. Ever think about that? Or how about with evergreen, they had nvidia on the ropes, they had their highest marketshare in ATi's history, they made bank on sales. So what did they do? Well, they rebranded of course! Only to then be completely blindsided by the fact that nvidia didnt, in fact, simply lay down and surrender, they fixed fermi and took back the performance crown. Or how about the utter disaster that was bulldozer, and how AMD pushed it out anyway despite knowing it was a dumpster fire. Or how about AMD pulling out of the server and high performance desktop markets entirely for 3 years, giving intel a monopoly on high volume, high margin products? Or AMD rebranding their 7000 series 3 TIMES as nvidia was making better arches every 18 months! Or AMD ignoring their customer base for over a freaking DECADE involving their driver problems, only to be caught with their pants down, again, by nvidia's frame pacing tool showing just how awful radeon catalyst truly was? Or how about AMD seceding the mid range and up GPU market to their only competitor, giving nvidia ~85% of the profits from the GPU front? Or the price gouging with the OG FX CPUs? Do you not remember the days of $1000 single core chips? Do you think AMD never price gouged?
And, of course, nobody can forget AMD's biggest fuckup, the development of global foundries, which sucked up billions upon billions from AMD's coffers, nearly bankrupted them, and helped kickstart their horrible decisions later down the line.
ALL of this, ALL of it, is AMD's fault. AMD has, time and time again, screwed up their own future with short sighted, almost suicidal at times, business decisions. Yes, OK, intel's bribes hurt them. Do you know when that happened? The pentium IV days! 2001-2005 (and notice, right there, that despite the bribes AMD still made enough cash to develop enough credit to spend BILLIONS on ATi)! Everything past then is AMD's fault, AMD is in their current position because they spend way too much money on developing poor drivers and chasing features the average user doesnt need (mantle and trueaudio for instance) instead of focusing on decent drivers, good chips, and competitive designs.
Saying AMD is responsible for AMD's fuckups isnt ridiculous unless you have no concept of personal responsibility. if it wasnt for lisa su and jim keller, at this point AMD would have been beyond bankrupt.
Now, I don't know your politics, but you're showcasing a clear example of classic neo-liberal denial of long-term causality here, and a strong stance for a historically isolated and simple transactional view of how the world works. I'm in no way denying that AMD has screwed up -
severely - quite a few times. They've had some astronomically bad leadership at times. And yes, they've been perilously close to bankruptcy. But at the same time, you admit that Intel (which even then had a large market share advantage) was systematically robbing them of earnings by bribery at a time where AMD would, in a fair market, have made significant inroads and built up cash reserves. Instead, their gains were minor, and made them susceptible to what has happened since. Your way of framing this is actively denying that the actions of Intel had consequences down the line, which is absurd and illogical. Has AMD made a series of bad decisions? Absolutely. The question is how many of them are directly attributable to lack of R&D funding, in which case Intel's "trickery" stands in a direct causal relation to them. Most of what you're presenting here (being late to respond to Core, launching Bulldozer despite it sucking, rebranding GPUs more than Nvidia, leaving the server market) can be quite clearly attributed to being less flush with cash than their competition, as having bigger R&D budgets would have solved
all of them.
You're saying "Intel screwed over AMD, but AMD wasted 2 billion on ATI and nearly went bankrupt all on their own", while I'd say "Intel screwed over AMD, and AMD wasted 2 billion on ATI, which due to Intel's shenanigans nearly bankrupted them." One view allows for perspective, the other is a blatant denial of the value of this. It's pretty clear to me which is more correct.
-That AMD argument is VERY suspicious, as well as bringing up early 2000's bribes. It suggests you want government regulation on GPU prices because AMD is currently non-competitive, and you want AMD to be competitive. A red team fan perhaps? Sorry, but for those of us that have been building PCs for years, we know that AMD, above all else, is responsible for AMD's horrible decisions, abysmal business practices, wasted capital, and lazy, outdated designs arriving years late to market. AMD over promised and under delivered for nearly a decade, and users stopped trusting them. This led to lower sales, which led to less R+D money, which led to worse chips that under delivered, which led to lower sales. Yes, intel and OEMs hurt them, but AMD is responsible for the decade+ of screw-ups since then, and those screwups are the reason for high prices, not the lack of regulation. Demanding regulation because a company has become noncompetitive shows a blatant lack of understanding free markets, market forces, and basic economics.
You said that my argument was "suspicious", yet fail to show how it is so. Care to elaborate? You seem to be oh-so-subtly hinting that I'm an AMD fan and that this is the most likely reason for wanting something so absurd as regulations enforcing fair trade. Now, I could call myself an "AMD fan", but that's because I generally root for the underdog, which AMD is in both CPUs and GPUs, and has been as long as I've been building PCs. If that was Nvidia, I'd root for them instead (I very much did in the case of Nvidia's attempt at entering the mobile ARM market). If the market flipped and AMD became dominant, I'd be just as critical of them as I am of Nvidia and Intel today. My current leanings as a customer in this ridiculously skewed market are hardly an argument towards me not possibly being neutral, as it's entirely possible to have opinions separate from brand loyalty that at the same time align with current seeming brand loyalty. So: why should my stance be indicative of pro-AMD bias and not a desire for the market to be fair and balanced? And even if the former were true, would it matter, given that it's extremely unlikely for AMD to become a market leader in the near or middling future? I'd say no.
As for AMD's "decade+ of screw-ups since then", as I've said, in a fair market, they'd be far better suited to weather them. Intel has screwed up just as much in the last two decades (P4? Their various GPU projects? Their mobile push, where they literally paid billions of dollars to companies to make them use their chips? 10nm?), yet thanks to solid financials they're perfectly fine today, and more profitable than ever. Who knows if the same could have been said for AMD if they hadn't been cheated out of market share in the early 2000s, but it's highly likely that they'd be far better off than they are today.
And again: I have never, ever, said I want "government regulation on GPU prices." Please work on your reading comprehension.
-Enforcing GPU price regulations, or attempting to anyway, is only going to piss off the companies involved, and they WILL find other ways of making money (paid driver subscriptions and aggressive data mining anybody?). And hilariously, it will end up hurting AMD, as they wont be able to overcharge for 2+ year old chips and make money off of fanbois willing to fork over the cash. This restriction limits what goes into AMD's R+D budget. By lowering GPU prices artifically with arbitrary regulations, you would do more harm then good.
Again: trade regulations to ensure markets are fair != price regulations. What I'm arguing for is putting in place regulations that ensure that the market works along the well established and mutually agreed-upon "rules" of "free markets", such as fair competition (which is of course a complex subject) and supply and demand influencing prices, with checks on various forms of "gaming the system" (price dumping to bankrupt competition, bribery, artificial supply droughts, so on). None of this ought to be controversial. Yet you seem to see it as such.
It's natural that hardware price drops will slow, and possibly even that new hardware will become more expensive as process node shrinks become fewer and further spread apart and other technological advances become increasingly difficult to come by. That's okay, and again, fits perfectly well within a fair market. The thing is, we're not there yet, and if the system was balanced it would be a gradual process, not the flip of a switch like we've seen with recent GPU families.
