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calvoiper
join:2003-03-31
Belvedere Tiburon, CA
| reply to NormanS
Re: oops
said by NormanS  :... Government involvement is one of those slippery slope issues. How do you determine when the government should be a part of the mix (there are poor people in the west who could use cars for transportation)? At some point, you either say, "No", to government, or you decide to implement state socialism. Or you use that false dichotomy as an excuse to leave a former state-mandated monopolist in the dominant position in the marketplace while not enforcing those network and infrastructure sharing provisions that were part of the deal to remove separate governmental controls (e.g., long distance prohibition; rate regulation; etc.) on their monopoly status.
The slope may be somewhat slippery, but that doesn't proscribe all government involvement. Using your own example, auto transport in the west is heavily subsidized through tax funding of road construction. Without that, everyone would have to buy Hummers to get around.
Enough with the false "either-or" choices.
calvoiper
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VoIP--the death knell of remaining voice monopolies! | |
NormanS
Premium,MVM
join:2001-02-14
San Jose, CA
 ·Pacific Bell - SBC
| Cable was never a state mandated monopolist, is not now.
Telephone has to compete with cable, and along with cell phones, and VOIP, it is damned hard to convince me that there is a monopoly here.
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Norman
~Oh Lord, why have you come
~To Konnyu, with the Lion and the Drum | |
calvoiper
join:2003-03-31
Belvedere Tiburon, CA
| Well, with 90+% of the landline market, and with 80+% of the T-1 private line & special access market, the incumbent telcos qualify as a monopoly under virtually all economic tests. No anti-trust enforcement action has ever required 100% monopoly to impose anti-trust sanctions.
As for cable, they were a government mandated monopoly in many cities--I used "state" as representative of government in general, not just States in the US. The government protected cable's dominant position aggressively by adopting "immediate build-out" requirements for new entrants that the cable companies did not have to meet themselves when they started (i.e., high barriers to entry). They also gained tremendous market power through government protection--but they weren't as subject to TA-'96 as the telcos were, in part because they lack the long history of anticompetitive conduct of the Bell System.
Overall, it's not just how many competitors you have--it's a larger test of how effectively you dominate a market. And the Baby Bells still dominate their respective markets.
calvoiper
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VoIP--the death knell of remaining voice monopolies! | |
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