This is only true of uncompetitive markets. If Target refused to sell you clothes because someone made a false copyright infringement claim against you, you would laugh in their face and go shop at any of a thousand other stores. And for exactly that reason they don't even attempt to do things like that.
Moreover, in many cases the regulations are what make markets uncompetitive. Providing internet service to urban areas is highly lucrative and has relatively low costs -- if you could pull $40/month from each of a hundred people just for wiring a single high rise, companies would be lining up left and right to do that. But you aren't allowed to do that without also providing service to an area covering hundreds of square miles, including random farmhouses that are ten miles apart from one another. A competent government would instead solve that problem through direct subsidies to providers who expand into rural areas (or leave it to the market to figure out how to connect sparse farmhouses with some kind of medium-speed directional wireless or similar), and then there would be more competition. But we haven't got that.
Moreover, even when there are actual natural monopolies (like roads or rural internet) that can justify government involvement, what works best in those cases is often for the government to just provide the thing directly rather than trying to regulate some independent private entity with a 96% chance of capturing the regulators.
what you say would be true of (increasingly rare) mom-and-pop shops, but the relationship you use is highly asymmetric and favorable to the large bureaucratic organization, no matter the competitive dynamics of the market. target would be the one laughing in your face, not the customer.
the false dichotomy of preferring one bureaucracy over another because one is private and the other public is silly (in case it's unclear, you should prefer neither).
the rest of what you said is reasonable however. direct provision, direct subsidies, or removal of regulatory barriers in rural access would be better than the convoluted compromise we have now.
Target has a thousand competitors selling substantially identical products for similar prices. Walmart, Amazon, eBay, Kmart, Costco, Staples, J.C. Penney etc. They have no market power.
By contrast, if you can't get internet from Comcast you basically have to move to another state.
really understanding a firm's market power and the competitive dynamics of it's market requires a bit more depth than noting that products are similar.
(there are also different forms of market power, but i'll leave that for another day)
Costco and Amazon have lower unit margins because they charge annually for memberships or Prime. Walmart has lower nominal markups because they don't use promotions, so all their nominal markups are their actual markups rather than regularly getting eroded by promotions.
When it all shakes out, the thing that costs ~$15 at Target costs ~$15 at Walmart.
> why do you think target spends so much on branding?
That's what companies with no market power do. They can't significantly raise prices so they push to drive sales volume.
> really understanding a firm's market power and the competitive dynamics of it's market requires a bit more depth than noting that products are similar.
On the other hand, when they're independently selling the same product for the same price...
https://www.target.com/p/lego-minecraft-the-zombie-cave-2114...
https://www.walmart.com/ip/LEGO-Minecraft-The-Zombie-Cave-21...
https://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Minecraft-Zombie-21141-Building/...
i'll just note that branding is first and foremost about pricing power. lower cost forms of marketing are employed to encourage volume.
Buying a branded product is really buying two separate products. One is the commodity and the other is certification of the commodity by the brand. People might pay more for a product certified to be a known quantity than one that isn't, but that isn't the same as market power because certification can be a commodity too. Some random hole in the wall can't compete with McDonald's on being known and consistent, but Burger King and Wendy's can, which is sufficient to keep their prices in check.
Charging more because you're providing something some competitors don't have is not market power when some different competitors do have it.
Regulation is necessary to prevent monopolies, and monopolies by definition make markets uncompetitive. Antitrust regulation protects capitalism from itself. Unfortunately the Antitrust division of the Justice Department has not been doing its job for several decades.
If we pretend geographic monopolies don't exist, maybe
and you're right! you can totally bail and go to the competition... like HughesNet. They're just the same, right?
(also more sarcasm)
Yep, government regulation sounds great. /s
That's an entirely different issue from what I was commenting on.
> And let's not forget, there is no competition - because the ISP has a legal monopoly, also enforced by the government.
You're forgetting that ISPs are natural monopolies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly:
>> "A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors. This frequently occurs in industries where capital costs predominate, creating economies of scale that are large in relation to the size of the market; examples include public utilities such as water services and electricity.[1] Natural monopolies were discussed as a potential source of market failure by John Stuart Mill, who advocated government regulation to make them serve the public good."
> Yep, government regulation sounds great. /s
You're right, it does sound great; especially when you remove the blinders of misunderstanding. Admittedly, it's not entirely without it's own problems, but those problems are best solved without re-introducing the problems that regulation successfully mitigates.
This is where many of the arguments against government regulation break down. If you take government out of the picture, you're still left dealing with massive institutions and bureaucratic regulations. The main difference is that those institutions are even less accountable to the average person than the government, and they have obvious interests in tilting every table to advantage themselves.
Dealing with a corporate bureaucracy is dealing with a regulatory body that's been totally captured by that corporation.