6 ms·

it isn't a commons if it's owned by a corporation. there is no tragedy of the commons here, because google bears the consequences of these rules. if people try

• topkai22 6y ago
  Just because it’s owned by a private entity doesn’t automatically exclude it from being a common.
  • samoa42 6y ago
    yes it does
• kortilla 6y ago
  “commons - land or resources belonging to or affecting the whole of a community.“ It does not have to belong to the community to be a commons. It just has to affect the entire community.
  • risho 6y ago
    https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/common-resource.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/common-resource.asp >A common resource (or the "commons") is any scarce resource, such as water or pasture, that provides users with tangible benefits but which nobody in particular owns or has exclusive claim to. Google owns their hard drive space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons >The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. These resources are held in common, not owned privately. Google owns their hard drive space. Also a commons has the implication of everyone having access to access said resource. You aren't entitled to access to googles hard disk space.
    • kortilla 6y ago
      By that “no true Scotsman” definition, there are very few commons. All land is owned by someone and there are still tragedy of the commons scenarios. The important bit for a tragedy of the commons is that the users don’t have any meaningful ownership or motivation to fix the system. The town commons where people grazed their livestock was literally owned by the government. Be it the government or a faceless company that doesn’t charge for it, it doesn’t make any difference from an economic perspective. > Google owns their hard drive space. Also a commons has the implication of everyone having access to access said resource. No it doesn’t. A commons has the implication that everyone in a particular community has access to something. A tragedy of the commons can easily occur within completely gated communities with the commons owned by a private corporation.
      • lmm 6y ago
        > By that “no true Scotsman” definition, there are very few commons. All land is owned by someone and there are still tragedy of the commons scenarios. > The town commons where people grazed their livestock was literally owned by the government. That's not really true; the pre-enclosure commons simply wasn't owned in the sense we'd understand it today, just as Native American land was administered in ways we wouldn't recognise as ownership. Treating land as akin to chattel is a relatively recent development.
        • kortilla 6y ago
          It was owned in the sense that mattered. A governing body could make changes to the land or its use if it cared. Even in Native American tribes they made rules about how to use different areas. The critical relationship in the tragedy of the commons is misaligned incentives between the users and the owners. Users have incentive to act greedy and the owner has no incentive to fix it because it doesn’t hurt them if the thing stops being useful for that activity.
          • lmm 6y ago
            > It was owned in the sense that mattered. A governing body could make changes to the land or its use if it cared. Not really. Often there was simply no entity that exercised executive function over the land or its use, which is a large part of why even plainly dysfunctional arrangements persisted. The idea that there must be an owner to incentivise is modern and ahistorical. As traditionally conceived, the tragedy occurs not because "the owner" has the wrong incentives but because there simply isn't an owner. Pre-modern states didn't have the capacity to administer land in that kind of detail, even if they'd wanted to.