My experience with multiple telcos (Verizon, and others) leads me to believe they simply have very little operational control. Get their processes inmotion and find a competent local tech, and they'll sort it out. But try to get one department talking to another and it's a complete clusterfrob. Size, complexity, undertraining, lack of incentives, and distributed authority, and an under-empowered front-line CSR bureau.

>if people died because of it, I would expect criminal charges to be filed

I have a contract to rent you X fire trucks. I have other contracts with other people to rent Y fire trucks to them. There's a fire and X fire trucks are being used to save people in X+1 fires. That last person dies because you didn't rent X+1 fire trucks. I could have given you an additional fire truck in the allotment of Y. Morally you can make the case that I ought to give you one more fire truck but how have you made the case that legally I should give you a non contracted fire truck?

Destroying the truck renter's property rights by the state forcing me to give you my property (that +1 fire truck) but in the long run it results in under allocation of goods and theft-premium being added as a cost.

> Morally you can make the case that I ought to give you one more fire truck but how have you made the case that legally I should give you a non contracted fire truck?

At least in my country, legally speaking there is a case that you should send one of Y's trucks to X, as there is a risk of life.

Various towns requisition each others trucks, operators, and more during the bushfire season. And that requisition may just be a phone call with someone yelling that they need more help at the other end. And that's legally enforceable.

This leads to X questioning why they need any trucks at all, since they can always demand trucks from Y.

No it doesn't.

Maybe in the little thought experiment you're trying to conduct it does, but not in the real world. There are plenty of other variables at play.

X knows that if they need trucks and Ys are in use, then people die and they'll get blamed. They know that local trucks will respond faster so fewer people die.

In one off emergency situations in the real world, people actually help each other. We're not just a bunch of ideal game theory pieces in some amaeteur economist thought experiment.

If you offer unlimited fire trucks, but then limit the fire department to getting 1 fire truck a day, it's not really even close to unlimited is it?

If you offer unlimited fire trucks for $X per month then if someone only pay for one month in theory during that period they should have unlimited trucks. They don't...

Given infinite time they could obtain infinite fire trucks, so where's the limit? There is none.

Oh no! I wouldn't want under allocation of goods to happen, better let people die instead.

See this is why we can't have nice things in America like socialized medicine.

When people are dying, focusing on property rights is just plain evil.

I mean...take the good will you earned for that X+1 truck, renegotiate the contract.