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That sounds exactly like a binary, as hinted at by a sibling comment: Breakup of a company monopoly (always good for the consumer) vs. Breakup of a government m
by maeil 2y ago
That sounds exactly like a binary, as hinted at by a sibling comment: Breakup of a company monopoly (always good for the consumer) vs. Breakup of a government monopoly (potentially bad for the consumer)
- crazygringo 2y agoNo, because of the part on how local phone rates went up when AT&T was broken up. There's no "always" here, the world is not that simple. Breaking up a large company is often going to be good for some sets of customers, bad for others.
- luma 2y agoIn that case, it mostly just created local monopolies. You still didn’t have a choice for local service unless you moved several hundred miles away. From the consumer’s perspective, we just replaced one monopoly with another.
- josefx 2y ago> because of the part on how local phone rates went up when AT&T was broken up. Isn't that caused by the "last mile" problem? Even with the split there was always only one company in control of local infrastructure and from what I understand they could even block newcomers from installing their own, citing concerns over possible service interuptions and various kinds of interference. I think Google Fibre even went through several experimental ways to get its infrastructure in place just so it could avoid dealing with any of that.