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> If you get big enough, they swoop in and make you turn everything you've invented into an open standard? Consider 20th century AT&T. They were the phone comp
by mystified5016 2y ago
> If you get big enough, they swoop in and make you turn everything you've invented into an open standard?
Consider 20th century AT&T. They were the phone company in America, owning approximately all telecommunications hardware, including the physical handsets in consumer's homes (they were rented).
Competition with AT&T was in no uncertain terms entirely impossible. The cost to lay down even a fraction of the cables that AT&T owned was so astronomical that only government entities like cities could afford it. The main problem being that most of the cables are on other people's property and negotiating easments is incredibly expensive and unbelievably slow.
How could any competition be possible? AT&T owns the wires to 98% of all telco customers, and running new wires is all but impossible.
The US government forced AT&T to allow other telecom companies to use their wires. The Bell subsidiaries had to physically built out their COs to accommodate new equipment owned by other companies. This prompted hundreds or thousands of new companies to pop up and started market competition overnight.
AT&T got slapped down hard, but the net result for consumers was more choice, better prices, new and better services. The only reason consumers got DSL was as a scheme to sidestep the charge for handling a "call" over the shared wires. If the wires weren't shared and exploited, Bell would have kept everyone on dialup much longer.
So yeah, I think if you get big enough, your services become so vital that they become a public good. The telephone system went from a private monopoly to a public utility and the benefits to consumers and society is incalculable.
- bri3d 2y agoThe AT+T analogy is so different that there is a clear term for it in economics: "natural monopoly." It is quite obvious to me that natural monopolies require strict regulation. I do not believe that smartphone handsets are a natural monopoly (besides carrier locking, which is orthogonal to this conversation). If a customer believes that the more "open" hardware+software ecosystem is superior, they can buy that ecosystem (as most Europeans do; I don't think Apple even have close to majority market share in Europe!)
- shuckles 2y agoPut differently: what favorable, exclusive land leases did Apple negotiate from the European Union to gain its "monopoly" in the smartphone market? What multibillion dollar private/public partnership led to iPhone?
- kmeisthax 2y ago> The only reason consumers got DSL was as a scheme to sidestep the charge for handling a "call" over the shared wires. If the wires weren't shared and exploited, Bell would have kept everyone on dialup much longer. Even worse, Ma Bell probably would have forbade home modem use if they had the choice. There were significant downsides to funneling packet-switched traffic over a circuit-switched medium; dial-up Internet calls could last hours tying up circuits with almost completely dead air. You might be interested in this CRD video, it covers basically the entire dial-up Internet era and almost every regulatory hurdle involved with setting up an ISP here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ympjaibY6to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ympjaibY6to