""I do not believe we should cancel those who want to regulate down prices on pharmaceuticals, even though likely they will kill millions over time, at least to the extent they succeed. (Supply is elastic!) But if we can like them, tolerate them, indeed welcome them into the intellectual community, we should be nice to others as well. Because the faults of the others probably are less bad than those who wish to regulate down the prices of U.S. pharmaceuticals."

Cowen's point is that while many countries aggressively regulate the price of pharmaceuticals, you ultimately need a profit motive to invest in the massive up-front cost in developing new drugs; that profit comes from the U.S. market. The reason this all works is that the actual production of drugs is similar to technology: once the drug is approved every marginal pill is effectively zero marginal cost; this means that it is worth selling drugs at highly regulated prices, but you still need a reason to develop new drugs as well.

So it is with technology; to take the Meta example above, the company may very well be brought to heel with regards to offering a non-personalized-ads business model: Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp are already developed, operations teams already exist, data centers are already built, so maybe a fraction of potential revenue will be worth continuing to offer those services in the E.U. Moreover, there is the matter of network effects: should Meta leave the E.U. it will make its services worse for non-E.U. users by reducing the size of the network on its services.

This comparison is a bridge too far. When person is in hospital fighting for life Zuckerberg's website is nothing more than a useless distraction. Whereas drugs can save life. There is no comparison. If Meta conducts "R&D" on their own cryptocurrency (Libra), the "Metaverse", surveillance glasses, "AI" nonsense or whatever it thinks is "the next big thing", it is not a matter of life or death. No lives depend on the success or failure of these projects. People invested in them will claim they will save lives and much more... someday. Please wait. It is speculation. Life-saving drugs are real, not speculation. In the pharmaceutucal industry it is too expensive to "move fast and break things". Failure costs too much money.

"That's not the only cost that is going up for Apple in particular: part of the implication of the "Core Technology Fee" model is that Apple has put forth a tremendous amount of engineering effort to accomodate its platform to the DMA specifically. Or, to put it another way, Apple has already forked iOS: there is one version for the E.U., and one version for the rest of the world. This too dramatically changes the calculus: yes, every E.U. user comes in at zero marginal cost, but not the E.U. as a whole: Apple isn't just paying the expected value of future fines, but actual real costs in terms of engineering time and overall complexity."

Comparing life-saving drugs to some feature of Apple's BSD-based privatised operating system. This is insane. Computer nerds are going to make computers do stuff whether someone is paying them or not. Computers are toys to these people and they will play for a lifetime; it is not work. Overhead costs for software development are extremely low. Free "features" are "shipped" with alarming frequency, for marketing purposes. Software development is almost entirely unregulated. Whereas development of therapeutics is a highly regulated, costly endeavor that can take a decade. Lab equipment, purpose-built facilities, clinical testing. Experimentation costs money. How much does it cost to play with software. Nothing. Time.

Another thing that costs nothing: Stratechery blog posts.