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Many would say that these markets are poorly functioning due to government interference in first place, like these very laws, for instance.

• Ericson2314 10y ago
  Traditionally, such laissez-faire views would distinguish government constraining itself and government constraining the private sector, approving of the former and not the latter. But I'm down to look at both the same way (especially when, as I wrote, government is constrained not to indefinitely run at a loss so as to play by more similar rules). That said, I know of little historical evidence that market competitiveness restores itself in the absence of external meddling. The fact is in telecom we are coming off a history of official monopoly, competition, and then a near-reformation of the monopoly without the increased regulation to go with it. So it sure as hell looks as if we backed off the controls and market-based approaches failed. Now it could be that post-deregulation and trust-busting, there was still too much regulation, but again I don't often see laissez-faire views claiming that government entry into the marketplace must be allowed. A middle ground that I'm more receptive to is that a never-interfered-with market will always self-correct, but past interference interference may have distorted the market into an otherwise-unreachable state where self-correction is not possible. In that case we should with heavy intrusion try to force the market into a good state, and then slowly easy off the controls carefully monitoring to see if such self-correction does occur. Economic pontificating aside, with wired networks I think there is a legitimate public interest in fewer redundant wires (like roads), and too much incumbency advantage with the amount of infrastructure required, for me to put much faith in market-based approaches. Wireless networks on the other hand largely avoid those problems so I think that's a better area for them.