OTEC and Null Sec

I watched the development of the OTEC cartel (Organization of Technetium Exporting Corporations) with a little concern for my wallet and a lot of interest for Eve politics. The apparent goal of OTEC is to price fix at a high profit this fundamental component of tech II production while providing mutual support to ensure each member's source of Technetium is protected from outside influence.

So far since its announcement in late April they have succeeded in doing just that.

Can you see where OTEC started?

I see this development as a natural step of Null Sec's political evolution. Alliance leaders, like any business quickly become addicted to easy sources of income and this leads them to realize that cooperation is often more profitable than competition with other entities in their market. There is a reason that governments have laws to prevent monopolies and oligarchies in markets in their nations: competition is good for the consumer, not the producer (in the short term anyways). The main issue is that prices are kept higher to maximize profit at the cost of the consumer, but a secondary problem "in the real world" is that companies with cartels like this are less likely to invest in innovation for competitive advantage and are more likely to collude to maintain the status quo.

However, in Eve there is no chance at technological innovation. We can have process innovation (e.g. 3rd party tools to monitor POS towers and keep track of silo levels) and organizational innovation (e.g. better social structures to mine the moons more efficiently and protect them) but we can't have technology innovation (e.g. a new source of technetium or a new material to replace it) without CCP changing the game, much like they did to make Technetium the One Ring of moon materials a couple years ago (replacing Promethium and Dysprosium as the top dogs).

There has been a lot of talk out of Reykjavik about how having certain areas of the cluster more rich than others is a conflict driver for promoting wars. Like King of the Hill, the kids at the bottom work hard to push the guys at the top off in a never ending cycle, right? The problem is with Technetium is that the current kings of the hill stopped fighting each other and are getting fat and strong off the top of the hill, leaving the kids at the bottom to be forced to throw occasional snowballs instead of an ineffectual climb up to simply get a snow face wash.

Technetium will be nerfed, its only a matter of time. Its been longer than I expected for sure; I predicted it being addressed in Crucible and was sorely mistaken. But the fact is that while it may have been a great conflict driver and possibly responsible for the fall of the Northern Coalition, it is no longer doing so and is in fact doing the exact opposite as evidenced by OTEC.

How will CCP address this? Ring mining to introduce a non-alliance active source for moon materials has been discussed and something I'm very in favour for. Rebalancing moon materials so that the other R64s are as valuable as Technetium has been mentioned. Overhauling moon mining completely has been suggested. But right now, we don't know which of these options CCP is most likely to do.

Time will tell. In the meantime, expect your ship prices to continue to look like this:

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to compare with the Technetium chart above.