5 ms·
A free market for companies that need to tear up every road in your town to lay their own cable is impossible (to say nothing of apartment and office buildings)
by larrik 13y ago
A free market for companies that need to tear up every road in your town to lay their own cable is impossible (to say nothing of apartment and office buildings). Internet pricing and business has nothing to do with a free market, and likely never will. Deregulating them was asinine.
- hga 13y agoBit worse than that, in that the telco monopoly starts at the Federal level. But your point is well taken: claiming the actions of government established monopolies (actually duopolies when you're lucky) are a failure of the free market, and calling on these same governments "to prevent [the] monopolies [they created in the first place] from forming and ensure that there is enough competition" when same governments seem to be entirely happy with the results is ... well, I don't think we live in the same reality. A bit more enlightened a government would at least have drawn a line at what these monopolies can do, i.e. keep them from competing with Netflix et. al., but that would be very problematic with cable companies.
- dsr_ 13y agohttp://www.alternet.org/story/148397/how_the_phone_companies_are_screwing_america:_the_$320_billion_broadband_rip-off?page=entire http://www.alternet.org/story/148397/how_the_phone_companies... Or, simply put, the incumbent carriers promised to put fiber to the home in millions of houses in exchange for deregulation; then they didn't fulfill their part of the bargain, because nobody was regulating them.