4 ms·

More simple yet: you build it, you get to decide what to do with it.

• vog 10y ago
  Just curious, what do you mean with "you built it"?
  • KMag 10y ago
    > Just curious, what do you mean with "you built it"? You know, paid taxes that funded government projects that largely developed the underlying technology. Got your friends in local and state governments to allow you to use a combination of public land and imminent domain to force people to let you build your network (nominally partially as a public good), etc., etc. Once your network was in place, you used regulations to prevent competitors from the same sorts of government manipulations. You built a telco that manipulated governments in the proper way, and now you get to engage in rent-seeking on those imminent-domain'd pipes all you like. At least in NYC, the local telephone company is required to lease phone lines to competitors essentially at-cost, as a condition of their monopoly status and use of imminent domain (according to my DSL installation guy when I moved to NYC a decade ago, when he explained that my landlord had cut all of the phone lines during renovation and Verizon would take their sweet time providing the legally required 12 inches of working phone line into the domicile). I don't think similar competitive measures apply to cable and fiber lines that also use public land and imminent domain.