>Facebook tried to brand itself as a utility. However it's not. Its social network is neither a necessity to join nor impossible to compete against. Utilities

>Facebook tried to brand itself as a utility. However it's not. Its social network is neither a necessity to join nor impossible to compete against. Utilities are those things we traditionally call utilities, like electricity, water, telephone line and nowadays, an internet line. It's the combination of high capital costs and the limited geographical scope of users per capital project, that makes the market naturally uncompetitive. >Indeed, everything gravitates towards a monopoly as it maximizes shareholder value at the expense of the large economic community, In a free market, only utilities gravitate to a monopoly. Other sectors are open to competition, which periodically causes the market leader to be displaced. We've seen this in tech for decades. First it was IBM, then it was Microsoft, then Google, for a brief time Apple, and next who knows. >Regulation is necessary, you can debate the merits of a particular method, you can say some regulation is bad or some is good but remove the goverment ability to regulate currency leaves the economy vulnerable deflation during recession which is has been attributed to the recession of the 1930s The 1930s recessions was not primarily due to monetary policy. You can look at the crash of 1921 to see that sharp deflation does not lead to a bottomless downward spiral. The 1930s were a testbed for interventionist policy. It was these policies that kept the economy depressed and suppressed capitalist recovery. Not any dearth of controls by the government. Deflation itself can only exist when creating competing currencies is prohibited. What the Federal Reserve Act in the US, and similar regulations in other countries in that period, did, is outlaw competing bank notes. It created a banking cartel, with a fragile monetary mono-culture. So no, regulatory bans are not needed. They are harmful, and unethical. No one has a right to ban an activity that is consensual. >Will high credit card transaction fee's plunge civilization into a new dark age? Depends, will competition emerge, or will it be sabotaged by the complicated set of bans that is our regulatory system? E-gold eventually succumbed to the bans, but Bitcoin and its decentralized structure look to be more immune. MasterCard in Asia certainly hopes the government will step in with more regulations to stop Bitcoin: http://www.coindesk.com/mastercard-executive-argues-bitcoin-cant-trusted/ http://www.coindesk.com/mastercard-executive-argues-bitcoin-... He's counting on people like you buying the argument that freedom doesn't work, and the greater economy shouldn't be left free of regulatory bans like the internet was.