Artificial “intellectual property” monopolies are anathema to innovation, and they’re a major reason why the US tech industry is mostly reduced to making online chat room apps for cellphones developed by China’s tech industry. China’s choice to not enforce foreign companies’ “intellectual property” rights against its domestic industry exactly mirrors the US’s very successful choice to do exactly the same thing in the 1800s, except that the US did it overtly, rather than in violation of treaties it had signed. (However, the US’s territorial expansion during the same period, also crucial to its prodigious economic growth, was in violation of treaties it had signed.)
> US tech industry is mostly reduced to making online chat room apps for cellphones
That may be the face of the US tech industry that shows up on TechCrunch but the reality is that the rest of the industry is far more varied and much deeper than consumer apps like that.
Healthcare, energy, aerospace. Those—and a few dozen more—are all tech industries worried about IP protection. They just aren't sexy and don't make it to the top of HN.
The US has the least cost-effective healthcare system in the world except possibly for Switzerland — it manages to provide a reasonable level of care, similar to that of Cuba, but only by throwing enormous amounts of money at the problem. It's certainly true that it’s “worried about intellectual property protection”, but not in the way that you imply — intellectual property harms healthcare more than perhaps any other industry, accounting for a very substantial fraction of those massively overinflated costs. And it’s only through pushing through exceptions to the “intellectual property” regime pushed by the US, in WIPO, that India has been able to essentially end the AIDS epidemic in Africa.
Energy is the industry where US producers of photovoltaic panels — the primary source of marketed energy for the world starting in the 2020s — have had to seek domestic protection behind punitive tariffs against the Chinese manufacturers who are dominating the market by relentlessly copying each other’s innovations. Evergreen Solar, the only pure-play US photovoltaic company, went bankrupt in 2011.
The part of the US energy industry that’s actually an economic bright spot is oil and gas extraction. I don’t know much about their economic structure. Maybe you can elaborate?
Aerospace is indeed an exception to the overall pathetic performance of the US tech industry, and the 481,400 people working in 3364 aerospace in the US are rightly proud of that, although you’ve probably noticed that a lot of US companies that want to launch satellites end up having to buy launch services from Russia or Europe. But the US aerospace industry is largely supported by the US Department of Defense (74% of Lockheed’s income is from the military, and 45% of Boeing’s income is from BDS), and the DoD does not consider it an option to buy from lower-cost and higher-quality manufacturers in China or even Europe. That massive DoD R&D subsidy is what enables companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin to compete overseas (admittedly, against other similarly-subsidized competitors).
