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For decades, people in the US have been given a song and dance by the telecoms about how tax cuts, surcharges, and a long list of other expenses are necessary for telecoms to "invest" in infrastructure. The concessions are granted again and again, but the investments are never actually made. In all, US taxpayers have paid $400 Billion in taxes and Internet surcharges for fiber optic upgrades that never happened.
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Americans Taxed $400 Billion For Fiber Optic Internet That Doesn’t Exist
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Immerman on Monday December 04 2017, @09:15PM (2 children)
The fact that, by and large the free market had already created the monopolies before government stepped in to regulate them?
There's lots of natural monopolies in the world, they come free with economies of scale, and can only be challenged by incredibly deep-pocketed investors that can "buy in" at the same scale as the existing ones (basically never happens), or community organizations that force them to adhere to certain minimum standards/maximum profit margins (aka government regulation)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 04 2017, @09:49PM (1 child)
Your argument doesn't really work, because most such monopolies were created, supported, bolstered, etc., by government anyway. It wasn't capitalism, but rather cronyism, and the whole Anti-Trust movement was vote-grabbing by politicians who were trying to take advantage of the popular spread of marxist doctrines.
Furthermore, there's a good case to be made that the breaking up of certain monopolies did more harm to the American economy in general; I, for one, would rather money stay in productive hands, rather than fight fake competition or be allocated by know-nothing, paper-pushing bureaucrats.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday December 11 2017, @05:16PM
So you're saying that Standard Oil couldn't exist? Rockafeller basically got no help from the government establishing his monopoly, but was a ruthless businessman who used every trick in the book and invented a few new tricks to take over pretty close to the entirety of the American oil and gas industry.
The reason that monopolies are bad is that they create a market inefficiency: The monopolist can charge whatever they want for their product without having to worry about competitors undercutting their price. Per the classic supply-demand model, the supply curve has stopped being a line, and become the floor of an infinitely tall range. That means the monopolist can and does raise their prices to ridiculous levels that are far above the actual marginal cost of production. This not only hurts consumers that buy the product directly, it also distorts the prices of other products that used the monopolists' product as one of its components. And if the product in question is something essential, it also shrinks demand for any other product because buyers are spending more on that one product and thus have less to spend on other products.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.