Communication fosters innovation, therefor phone companies impair innovation by overcharging.
Satellite communications and distributed approaches could make communication nearly as cheap as GPS. Instead of exorbitant monthly fees. Less that 1% of which actually go towards infrastructure maintenance.
Invention builds on the past. Therefor intellectual property law retards progress.
Patent law was developed to ensure reasonable returns on investment in innovation, for the overall goal of fostering innovation. The assumption being that innovation comes via the search for profit, which is true.
But that is not the only motivation, and indeed it may not even be the primary one. Further if you confine profit to mean fiscal gains only then its importance as a motivator shrinks further still.
It has now evolved into a system where by the innovation of potential competitors is stifled, which obviously is good for those in a favorable position at the present.
The problem is innovation cant be predicted, which means it a stock holder’s bogeyman and they react with all the fervor of a paranoid schizophrenic, and in their quest to “protect their investment” that engage in wholesale slaughter of the means by which future innovation is brought about.
This stops being funny when the stakes are human suffering death and perhaps event the survival of the species.
