5 ms·
I don't think the definition is too unreasonable. Many areas would still be non-competitive according to the FTC: in order to guarantee that most of your custom
by tylerhou 8y ago
I don't think the definition is too unreasonable. Many areas would still be non-competitive according to the FTC: in order to guarantee that most of your customers are within 1/2 mile of another ISP, you'd have to significantly gerrymander your coverage areas into <2 mile wide strips. Or you'd have to ask another ISP to build in a certain fashion such that they have a bunch of isolated nodes or strips going through your large coverage area.
For reference, most of the coverage area in the map in another comment (https://imgur.com/3oUUw7b https://imgur.com/3oUUw7b) would probably be considered non-competitive.
I think 1/2 might be a bit too far, though. 1/4 seems maybe more reasonable.
- bo1024 8y agoIt's incredibly unreasonable. Economists roughly classify markets as monopoly (single seller), oligopoly (few, powerful sellers), and competitive markets. We are talking about a monopoly that's sort of close to being an oligopoly. A more accurate term would be "just barely not as far as possible from competitive".
- tylerhou 8y agoI'm not saying the current state of affairs is reasonable (i.e. I'm saying that ISPs are currently monopolies). I'm saying that the FTC's proposed definition to determine whether there is competition in a coverage area is reasonable. One heuristic I'm using to support my claim is that the FTC's proposed definition implies there is still an ISP monopoly in the area in the picture I linked.
- bo1024 8y agoIt might start making sense to me if they didn't use the word "competition" but that word means something else.