Nearly every HN post with a paywall has comments boycotting or denouncing said paywall, how else do you expect them to survive?

Americans would and should pay for this, collectively and without recourse, via a strong social safety net and possibly taxes. Your shelter, your food, a high quality of life for your kids, etc. should all basically be provided for, so that people can take risks and be daring journalists without being guilt-tripped into feeling like they sacrificed their offspring to their ego.

However, levying taxes to pay for things has been systematically demonized as just not an option at all, and by-and-large people have been hoodwinked into believing that more and more facets of society need to be mediated via "the free market", and if they fail that test, they are not deserving of existence.

It'll take a while until people realize that the market is just a tool, not a be-all-and-end-all.

If a public broadcaster publishes plainly biased stories, independent media can lambast them. But the shaming only has effect if the independent media is itself taken seriously; so the critique has to come from the middle ground.

What you won't get from publicly funded news is a rounded perspective on what opposing camps think. The extremes are lopped off; you won't get small government conservative ideology, and you won't get communist ideology. Being anodyne and factual is the best defense against criticism from both independent media and political sources.

If one's own position is significantly to one side of the political spectrum, naturally the middle looks like it's on the other side.

I wonder how that strange coincidence came about.

Despite NPR's reputation, many on the left are increasingly distrustful and critical of them, while many listeners on the right seem to prefer their talk shows to be full of yelling. I'm not sure the relentlessly centrist strategy is working for them.

And in some ways, it's unnecessary. Thanks to endowments and listener contributions, NPR could drop government money without major impact. Public funding is a small part of their budget.

Turns out corporations give them a lot of money too.

[0] http://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances

> "According to CPB, in 2009 11.3% of the aggregate revenues of all public radio broadcasting stations were funded from federal sources, principally through CPB; in 2012 10.9% of the revenues for Public Radio came from federal sources."

It appears approximately 10% of NPR funding is from the US government. That's a decent chunk, but not enough to hold sway if it goes against the majority of their donors.

Contrast that with a services like the BBC and RT which are almost all funded by taxpayer money:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC#Finances

> "According to the BBC's 2013/14 Annual Report, its total income was £5 billion (£5.066 billion),[2] which can be broken down as follows:

* £3.726 billion in licence fees collected from householders; * £1.023 billion from the BBC's commercial businesses; * £244.6 million from government grants, of which £238.5 million is from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for the BBC World Service; * £72.1 million from other income, such as rental collections and royalties from overseas broadcasts of programming. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network)#Budget

"When it was established in 2005, ANO TV-Novosti invested $30 million in start-up costs to establish RT,[14] with a budget of $30 million for its first year of operation. Half of the network's budget came from the Russian government; the other half came from pro-Kremlin commercial banks at the government's request."

"About 80 percent of RT's costs are incurred outside Russia, paying partner networks around $260 million for the distribution of its channels in 2014."

"In 2015, RT was expected to receive 19 billion rubles ($307 million) from the Russian government in 2016."

I'm not saying that I agree with this position. I think that without capital, the news industry would shrink and struggle even with a strong social safety net to support its journalists. Personal blogs cannot fully replace well funded news organizations.

I'm more concerned with the family of a daring journalist being safe regardless of their investigations, than with the actual remuneration of the journalist.

Granted it's a debated topic: http://cbcexposed.blogspot.ca/2017/07/is-cbc-news-biased.htm...

That relationship was pretty combative from both sides, though, no?

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/cbc-budget-cut-by-115m-over-...

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/cbc-funding-h...

Can't happen. Somebody is deciding to hand them money. That somebody's views are going to be catered too. Maybe not exactly, but close enough to keep the money flowing.

What does the natural adjective mean, the way you use it here?

If social networking were a natural monopoly, could a startup really stand a chance?

I feel the fast pace of innovation and customer behavior shifts makes these products very different from oil and railroads.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/3/15537000/whatsapp-stories-...

I prefer the more standard definition where a market that naturally tends to monopoly is one where a multi-company state is less efficient than a single company state.

In social networking, despite the power of network effects, having multiple companies is still efficient simply because people want to compartmentalize their networks of friends and interests. People want to use WhatsApp to talk to group A, and Skype to group B.

There's a tendency to assume that since phones were a monopoly, and mail is a monopoly, then all communication and social interaction aides must be naturally monopolies too, but that's not the case. Phones and mail were monopolies due to physical efficiency, not due to the desires of consumers.

>> natural monopoly for search

Google has most of the search users, creating better data for improving its product (ad targeting and search), so it gets all of the ad budget for search. Data+ad revenue suffocates the competition of users and revenue creating a natural monopoly.

A natural monopoly in an area arises from the dynamics of the business itself, other monopolies require external forces to prop them up.

This can occur through a number of dynamics, generally attributed to economies of scale, though network effects also come into play.

I'm exploring the idea that monopolies (natural or otherwise) are almost always strongly tied to network phenomena (not just in a physical sense), and are largely synonymous with the concept of economic rent.

There are a number of elements which accompany monopoly status, only some of which are strictly economic. Many of the others involve overt political or other power.

There are alternatives to Amazon, Facebook and Google - good ones at that - while it /could/ be argued that a search engine is an essential product, I would argue the opposite - and even more so for social networking and online shopping - if I saw conclusive proof that any go them were using their market power to force competitors out of the market, I might be more agreeable to the concept.

But even assuming it true, even that is not the standard by which anti-trust is judged. It's judged based on consumer welfare. That's where the debate should lie.

And no doubt it is a debate still. And the debate alone could shape actions and outcomes.

...to take one case.

It's the Intel approach. The US Government allowed Intel to keep its monopoly, while simultaneously restraining it enough that Intel wasn't able to truly lock out various competitors from rising up over time.

ARM, Samsung, nVidia, AMD, Taiwan Semi, etc.

It's also what ended up happening with Microsoft & Windows. Had the US Government not been involved at all, Microsoft could have trivially barred all competing search engines (bye Google) from their desktop platform, and all other browsers (bye Netscape, Chrome, Firefox), and all competing media software (bye iTunes), and so on.

Intel didn't have to be regulated as a fake natural monopoly that it in fact obviously wasn't (nor are Facebook or Google), in order to keep the lanes open to competition.

In the case of unitised oilfield control (that is: a single company or other entity controlled all extraction from a single resource), other monopoly powers might exist, most especially if the field exhibited lower-than-average costs (as in Saudi Arabia).