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Would you like to have 30 different companies digging your street to lay cables? Or 10 energy cables over your street because energy competition would be great
by thomasfortes 9y ago
Would you like to have 30 different companies digging your street to lay cables?
Or 10 energy cables over your street because energy competition would be great?
Even in a perfect world, infrastructure is a natural monopoly.
The government could handle all the big scale infrastructure and let small players handle the last mile, but that's not the case and even if it was, people would still complain.
- waterhouse 9y agoIf people accept 1 company doing it, would 2, or even 3 or 4, be so bad? Whatever rules limit it currently could be relaxed instead of eliminated completely; competition-wise, going from 1 to 2 is a much larger step than going from 5 to 10. Regarding power—as a matter of fact, I've had some power outages recently. I think 2 would provide some nice redundancy.
- thomastjeffery 9y agoNew businesses do not necessarily need to own the infrastructure. They just need bandwidth. Competing businesses could even work together to improve existing infrastructure. The problem is that existing monopolies do not dissipate without external pressure, because it is not to their benefit. We have 6 monopolies now, and we need to actively break them up. Short of that, we need to regulate them.
- jlillyreed 9y agoExisting businesses have many incentives to not give bandwidth on their infrastructure to their competition - especially at competitive prices
- betterunix2 9y agoIn some countries, and in the USA until 2005, the regulations require incumbent service providers to lease their infrastructure to competitors. France has such requirements, and unsurprisingly they pay less for their fiber optic service than Americans.
- thomastjeffery 9y agoThat is the heart of the problem.
- tripzilch 9y agoHow did you in the US ever manage to get cable TV everywhere?