Their is a long time debate between the ideals of communitarism and the ideals of cosmopolitanism, but another term for courteous noncompete agreements with your competitors is cronyism.
When does being nice to your competitors undermine your users' best interests? When does generosity toward people within your industry community benefit your industry at the expense of other communities, and how old does your company have to be before you can call that behavior cronyism? Do you have to smoke cigars in a poorly lit room? What if you just like being more generous to people who smoke cigars in dark rooms more than people who occasionally go outside, and are active? Does that make you a crony?
Reading these comments I get the impression that people want to be nice to others in companies like their own, more than they are describing any type of universal ethical guidelines.
"but another term for courteous noncompete agreements with your competitors is cronyism."
And another term for this sentence is a strawman argument. Nobody at all said there was a gentleman's agreement not to compete. Please read the article.
You might argue that it is a slippery slope argument, which is not a problem in itself, especially since there is a loose definition for what constitutes cronyism, but it is not a straw man argument.
The post calls for not drawing attention to when a competitor experiences a failure. That sort of chumminess does not encourage more robust infrastructure, it makes it difficult for new entrants to compete based on better reliability, and ultimately does not benefit customers.
When does being nice to your competitors undermine your users' best interests? When does generosity toward people within your industry community benefit your industry at the expense of other communities, and how old does your company have to be before you can call that behavior cronyism? Do you have to smoke cigars in a poorly lit room? What if you just like being more generous to people who smoke cigars in dark rooms more than people who occasionally go outside, and are active? Does that make you a crony?
Reading these comments I get the impression that people want to be nice to others in companies like their own, more than they are describing any type of universal ethical guidelines.