I am generally not a fan of the MIC, and I am not particularly impressed by the promise of this initiative, but I don't have any issue with an open, or a pseudo-open, or even open-with-favoritism approach to R&D.
It's hard to compete with free, but that doesn't mean the world should be stuck paying rents to proprietary vendors from now to the end of time. Sometimes your business model gets disrupted by a VC dumping a billion dollars into a money-losing startup. Sometimes it gets disrupted by a nation state dumping a billion dollars into money-losing R&D, that they then gift to their domestic firms. It's fine when Europe does it, it's fine when China does it, it's fine when the US does it.
The reason it's fine is because there's nothing about capitalism or markets that require your competitors to be profitable... Just like there's nothing about capitalism or markets which forbids arbitrary, regional advantages, be they related to your geography, your access to human capital, a unique regulatory environment, or your access to a friendly government that will subsidize your business (With grants, or R&D credits, or tech transfers, or just by buying a lot of stuff from you.)
To put another way - if some other government funded the development of a drug that cured cancer for $2/dose, I wouldn't shed any tears for the trillions of dollars of wasted R&D, and lost profits for existing vendors of cancer medication. I'd still feel that way, even if they went ahead and gifted the IP to a domestic vendor, that sold it at a hefty markup.
It's hard to compete with free, but that doesn't mean the world should be stuck paying rents to proprietary vendors from now to the end of time. Sometimes your business model gets disrupted by a VC dumping a billion dollars into a money-losing startup. Sometimes it gets disrupted by a nation state dumping a billion dollars into money-losing R&D, that they then gift to their domestic firms. It's fine when Europe does it, it's fine when China does it, it's fine when the US does it.
The reason it's fine is because there's nothing about capitalism or markets that require your competitors to be profitable... Just like there's nothing about capitalism or markets which forbids arbitrary, regional advantages, be they related to your geography, your access to human capital, a unique regulatory environment, or your access to a friendly government that will subsidize your business (With grants, or R&D credits, or tech transfers, or just by buying a lot of stuff from you.)
To put another way - if some other government funded the development of a drug that cured cancer for $2/dose, I wouldn't shed any tears for the trillions of dollars of wasted R&D, and lost profits for existing vendors of cancer medication. I'd still feel that way, even if they went ahead and gifted the IP to a domestic vendor, that sold it at a hefty markup.