3 ms·

It's the difference between a regulated pro-consumer free market, and a lobbyist controlled market presenting a duopoly as a free market. It's one of the negat

• ekianjo 9y ago
  > It's one of the negative consequences of mainstream media / political free market rhetoric considering regulation harmful. Well regulation can be harmful if it protects the incumbents and prevents the introduction of new players. Lobbyists are usually pushing for more regulation, not the opposite. It's not about regulation or not regulation, it's about what kind of regulation makes sense for a free market.
• rayiner 9y ago
  The difference is that NTT lost money for years offering wholesale fiber below cost: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.489.3371&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.489... (pages 11, 16). It could do that because it has a national near-monopoly in the wholesale space (it get some money from every subscriber, no matter what ISP they use), Japan's economy offers much lower returns than the U.S.'s (making low return infrastructure investments relatively more attractive), and NTT is 1/3 owned by the government (which ordered it to deploy fiber, regardless of profits).