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To: Bearded One who wrote (18873)	5/3/1998 2:21:00 AM
From: Gerald R. Lampton	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24154

Bearded One: I checked out your link on the netscape thread, and have some stupid questions. If you've already covered them, just point me to the links. trying to duplicate a bug that occurred on some tester's machine out in Peoria can be very difficult. When somebody from Peoria posts a bug fix, how do you know, without replicating the bug, exactly what bug is being fixed? How do you know if the bug exists and will be fixed on all machines, operating under all conditions? How do you know something quirky in Peoria is not what accounts for the bug, or that something quirky might not cause problems on that machine out there that you are not aware of? I think Darwin can take care of this one-- those versions which cannot read the web properly will not propagate. I think it depends -- who is to say that multiple versions might not even lead to a fracturing of the web, just as the competition between IE and Netscape has done? What's to keep someone from pulling a Microsoft -- developing some proprietary rendering technology, then distributing a freeware browser based on netscape source code to read it? After all, different species are best suited for different environments. And, perhaps the dumbest question of all: How will Netscape make money doing this?

To: Bearded One who wrote (18873)	5/3/1998 3:00:00 AM
From: Gerald R. Lampton	Respond to of 24154

Some more interesting comments from Bork's past writings: These come from "The Role of the Courts in Applying Economics," 54 Antitrust L.J. 21, 25 (1985). This rather short article appears to be from a symposium called "Antitrust in Transition." "Fred [Rowe, one of the other participants in the symposium, I assume--GRL] refers to the oligopoly model, which dominated antitrust for a while; then what he calls the efficiency model, which has now come into dominance; and finally to the learning curve model. In fact, the oligopoly model and the learning curve model are merely particular explanations of how things work that are within the efficiency model. . . . All of these things, all of the models or theories we are talking about, are simply stages in the intellectual evolution of what Fred calls the efficiency model. Wouldn't it be something if it turned out that the "network externalities" and "path dependency" models were also "simply stages in the intellectual evolution of what Fred calls the efficiency model"? And, in fact, I've started delving into some of the literature on network externalities, trying to get a handle on it, and have come up with the following tantalizing tidbit: "Markets exhibiting network externalities can fail, in that the unregulated outcome produces less total surplus than is possible. Indeed, recognizing that 'externality' is commonly understood to denote market failure. . . . This, from Lopatka & Page, "Posner's Program for the Antitrust Division: A Twenty Five Year Perspective," 48 SMU L. Rev. 1713, 1739 (1995). Now, there's a boatload of literature out there, and by no stretch of the imagination do I understand this stuff yet. But, it sure would be interesting to know what Bork's opinion is about these new-fangled theories called "network externalities" and "path dependency." I have a sneaking, growing suspicion that the answer just might surprise us.