Nitpick: Rent-seeking is an economic term that describes an actor that provides no value for end users. It is not a synonym for someone who rents you something.
It’s confusing because it can apply to landlords who also seek to restrict supply, and people then conflate the former with the term.
Of those companies listed, maybe you can finger Oracle for their shenanigans with Java.
Rent seeking is the wrong term for those businesses. A more appropriate term might be a market maker.
Rent seeking specifically means to extract extra money from an existing asset, but not produce any extra value (but purely by virtue of owning the asset).
It's supposed to refer to a company's priorities shifting away from the customer's, "rent seeking" is instead about profiting from owning limited resources. They are different things.
> There's a reason "rents" are called "rents"; land rent is the most classic example of them. The "owner" of a piece of land does nothing to produce its value, they just take money for nothing because they hold a scarce resource.
Rent seeking is a clearly defined economic concept that is not related to the seperate concept of renting an asset to somebody.
> Rent seeking is an economic concept that occurs when an entity seeks to gain wealth without any reciprocal contribution of productivity. An example of rent seeking is when a company lobbies the government for grants, subsidies, or tariff protection.
While to a certain extent real estate has been transformed into something that, in some cases, approximates a commodity, it is historically the canonical non-subsitutable monopolized good where each item lacks perfect substitutes, which is why “rent-seeking” is literally named after what landlords do. Renting out real estate is the “trope naming” instance of rent-seeking.
Simply renting out products is not necessarily the same as rent-seeking. Rent-seeking is the extraction of uncompensated value from others without increasing productivity. The classic example is putting up a chain across a river and charging passing boats a toll to lift the chain.
Ostensibly Adobe's customers are paying for continual improvement and support of its product and maintenance costs associated with whatever cloud features they offer. That's not rent-seeking.
“Rent seeking” has a specific technical meaning, which is not the same as “collecting rent”. Most SaaS companies are by no means rent seeking, and in fact it’s hard for me to come up with an example of one that does it.
“Rent-seeking” does not mean “collects rent”. It’s a specific term that describes someone who inserts themselves into economic transactions without providing value.
The classic example is someone who puts a chain across a path and then charges to move the chain out of the way.
WRT landlords, you can still describe some of their behavior as “rent-seeking” if they are perpetuating a social or political environment where they get greater returns for doing nothing (e.g. NIMBY/BANANA)
> That's not the economic definition of rent seeking.
It is. In fact, the general economic concept of rent and rent-seeking are generalizations of the inherent features of real property rents, which are the source of the name.
(EDIT: Fixed egregious touch keyboard vomit, clarified “land” to “real property”.)
I think you're confusing the common meaning of rent for "rent seeking"[1] which, in economics, means specifically getting more resources in return for nothing. It's a pejorative definition.
Getting paid for a service is not rent seeking in the way people are using it here.
> Not nobody, just purely for profit rent seekers.
This is not an example of "rent-seeking behavior", which is a technical term with a specific meaning. It's not merely a synonym for "profit-maximizing behavior which I don't like".
It’s confusing because it can apply to landlords who also seek to restrict supply, and people then conflate the former with the term.
Of those companies listed, maybe you can finger Oracle for their shenanigans with Java.
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