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>Typically, when you have even two competitors, the quality is improved. It's hard to argue this is the case, especially for businesses that require a signific

>Typically, when you have even two competitors, the quality is improved. It's hard to argue this is the case, especially for businesses that require a significant amount of upfront capital. The trivial example in utilities are ISPs. You can argue that ISPs are not a "free market" because of the government doing X, Y, Z, but if it's the case that government intervention is required anyways, then removing the profit motive and having the government just build seems preferable. >Considering how much they pay for being default search engine on Apple, $1B is a pittance. The $1B number is a red herring. It cost them $1B to maintain the system. The costs of acquiring rockets and designing satellites, as a private company, is likely far greater. Secondly in the case of Google Maps, that product doesn't exist as it's own standalone business, but as one that was largely subsidized by another, more grossly profitable business. The question you should ask would if a company like Waze (pre-acquisition of course) could have built the infrastructure for GPS. The answer is likely no. Edit: Thinking about this more, there is a trivial counter-example to your point about being charged egress on the internet, and it's just Google Maps. Google did the work of mapping a huge amount of the US, and generally has the highest quality maps. If you wanted to use that data, much like a business uses GPS, Google charges an fee which has been often derided as exorbitant. Even in the face of new competitors like Apple Maps and OpenStreetMaps, Google has even increased prices. I feel we would be worse off if GPS was privatized like this as this would put companies like Uber, Flexport, and Waze at the mercy of a single profit driven "competitor". The "App Store" but for GPS doesn't sound like a better alternative.

xyzzyz 5y ago
> It's hard to argue this is the case, especially for businesses that require a significant amount of upfront capital. There is plenty of capital to be had these days, and a lot of competition in many capital-intensive industries. For example, we have multiple competitors in cloud computing space, despite it requiring ten of billions of dollars in capital to enter. The ISPs, and utilities in general are different not because they are simply capital intensive, but rather because they have low marginal return for marginal unit of capital spent, and because competition damages these return even higher. Launching a few satellites to provide service globally is a different sort of capital expense than painstakingly building out utilities every street and every block. > The $1B number is a red herring. It cost them $1B to maintain the system. The costs of acquiring rockets and designing satellites, as a private company, is likely far greater. Sure, which is why there has been no competition to GPS so far. However, SpaceX, now that it already has rocket and satellite expertise, could provide competition to Government GPS relatively easily. > The question you should ask would if a company like Waze (pre-acquisition of course) could have built the infrastructure for GPS. The answer is likely no. No, but they would simply buy license to use GPS, just like they bought license to use maps. No reason to pass these costs to users directly as a line item in a bill. That’s my point: there is no reason to believe that privately owned GPS would diminish the user experience. As I already mentioned, instead of subscription fees that people lacking business imagination keep bringing up, you could for example charge royalties per GPS receiver sold, you know, the way Android phones already pay dozens of dollars in royalties.

xyzzyz 5y ago

> It's hard to argue this is the case, especially for businesses that require a significant amount of upfront capital. There is plenty of capital to be had these days, and a lot of competition in many capital-intensive industries. For example, we have multiple competitors in cloud computing space, despite it requiring ten of billions of dollars in capital to enter. The ISPs, and utilities in general are different not because they are simply capital intensive, but rather because they have low marginal return for marginal unit of capital spent, and because competition damages these return even higher. Launching a few satellites to provide service globally is a different sort of capital expense than painstakingly building out utilities every street and every block. > The $1B number is a red herring. It cost them $1B to maintain the system. The costs of acquiring rockets and designing satellites, as a private company, is likely far greater. Sure, which is why there has been no competition to GPS so far. However, SpaceX, now that it already has rocket and satellite expertise, could provide competition to Government GPS relatively easily. > The question you should ask would if a company like Waze (pre-acquisition of course) could have built the infrastructure for GPS. The answer is likely no. No, but they would simply buy license to use GPS, just like they bought license to use maps. No reason to pass these costs to users directly as a line item in a bill. That’s my point: there is no reason to believe that privately owned GPS would diminish the user experience. As I already mentioned, instead of subscription fees that people lacking business imagination keep bringing up, you could for example charge royalties per GPS receiver sold, you know, the way Android phones already pay dozens of dollars in royalties.