> funny how efficient markets work.

Can one really speak of efficient markets when there are multiple near molopolies at various steps in the production chain with massive integration, and infinity amounts of state spending in the process?

Yes, free markets and monopolies are not incompatible.

When a monopoly uses it's status in an attempt to gain another monopoly, that's a problem and governments eventually strike this behavior down.

Sometimes it takes time, because you'd rather not go on a ideology power trip and break something that's useful to the country/world.

> > Can one really speak of efficient markets

> Yes, free markets and monopolies are not incompatible.

How did you get from "efficient markets" to "free markets"? The first could be accepted as inherently value, while the latter is clearly not, if this kind of freedom degrades to: "Sure you can start your business, it's a free country. For certain, you will fail, though, because there are monopolies already in place who have all the power in the market."

Also, monopolies are regularly used to squeeze exorbitant shares of the added values from the other market participants, see e.g. Apple's AppStore cut. Accepting that as "efficient" would be a really unusual usage of the term in regard to markets.

The term "efficient markets" tends to confuse and mislead people. It refers to a particular narrow form of "efficiency", which is definitely not the same thing as "socially optimal". It's more like "inexploitability"; the idea is that in a big enough world, any limited opportunities to easily extract value will be taken (up to the opportunity cost of the labor of the people who can take them), so you shouldn't expect to find any unless you have an edge. The standard metaphor is, if I told you that there's a $20 bill on the sidewalk in Times Square and it's been there all week, you shouldn't believe me, because if it were there, someone would have picked it up.

(The terminology is especially unfortunate because people tend to view it as praise for free markets, and since that's an ideological claim people respond with opposing ideological claims, and now the conversation is about ideology instead of about understanding a specific phenomenon in economics.)

This is fully compatible with Apple's App Store revenue share existing and not creating value (i.e., being rent). What the efficient markets principle tells us is that, if it were possible for someone else to start their own app store with a smaller revenue share and steal Apple's customers that way, then their revenue share would already be much lower, to account for that. Since this isn't the case, we can conclude that there's some reason why starting your own competing app store wouldn't work. Of course, we already separately know what that reason is: an app store needs to be on people's existing devices to succeed, and your competing one wouldn't be.

Similarly, if it were possible to spend $10 million to create an API-compatible clone of CUDA, and then save more than $10 million by not having to pay huge margins to Nvidia, then someone would have already done it. So we can conclude that either it can't be done for $10 million, or it wouldn't create $10 million of value. In this case, the first seems more likely, and the comment above hypothesizes why: because an incomplete clone wouldn't produce $10 million of value, and a complete one would cost much more than $10 million. Alternatively, if Nvidia could enforce intellectual property rights against someone creating such a clone, that would also explain it.

(Technically it's possible that this could instead be explained by a free-rider problem; i.e., such a clone would create more value than it would cost, but no company wants to sponsor it because they're all waiting for some other company to do it and then save the $10 million it would cost to do it themselves. But this seems unlikely; big tech companies often spend more than $10 million on open source projects of strategic significance, which a CUDA clone would have.)

You scuttled your argument by using apple AppStore as an example.

Sure they can. CUDA used to have a competitor, sponsored by Apple. It's name is OpenCL.

It was never really a competitor, as the other two sponsors Intel and AMD, never deliverd anything great with it.

Additionally the tooling is horrendous, plain old C, with the same compilation model as OpenGL.

It took getting a hard beating from CUDA, to finally add a bytecode format (SPIR), and at least support C++ as well.

Additionally the other mobile OS big name never cared about OpenCL, rather pushed their own thing, Renderscript.

So, to reiterate: Apple used to have a CUDA competitor that was so bad you guys get mad when I call it competition.

And after Apple dropped NVIDIA, they stopped caring about openCL performance on their GPUs.

And the tooling, people keep forgeting about CUDA tooling.