Telecom is a horse of a slightly different color though because they are intentionally granted regional monopolies over utilities. There should be better regulatory enforcement of these utility deals, but between regulatory capture and nearly trust-like brokered deals to swap regions among each other to best minimize any particular region's regulatory control and collusion opportunities between neighboring regions, almost all of the regulatory enforcement that should prevent certain types of monopolist behaviors has nearly no teeth left in the US.

Telecoms aren’t intentionally granted regional monopolies. It’s illegal under the Cable Act of 1992.

The distinction is on which meaning of "monopoly" and "monopoly with respect to what". Yes, no telecom should be the only telecom in a region, but each telecom is granted an exclusivity (monopoly) on a particular utility line: cable companies are given (in most regions) exclusive rights to a region's originally TV focused fiber and coax cables and phone companies are given (in most regions) exclusive rights to a region's originally phone-focused fiber and coax cables. The convergence of all such lines towards data/internet-utility lines has let things like the Cable Act of 1992 declare a telecom not a monopoly with respect to a region so long as there is, for instance, a duopoly with a cable and a phone company. But there is still just one cable company with a (should be) regulated monopoly on cable lines and installations, and there is still just one phone company with a (should be) regulated monopoly on phone lines and installations. Those exclusive utility licenses themselves are still called and managed as intentionally granted monopolies for the public benefit (which is why they are regulated as such, and should be enforced better).

Yet even under this situation of "competition" between say a cable company and a phone company in most regions you have a duopoly and in very rare cases you find tripolies in the US. I did accuse these companies of swapping agreements in a friendly matter like if not exactly as a Trust to evenly distribute such duopolies and make it tough to enforce the places where the laissez faire regulatory environment around the duopolies have led to de facto monopolies by benchmarks such as which provide modern internet speeds at the neighborhood and/or building level. (It's been too long since the US was last interested in trust busting. It's also maybe been too long with the hand off the regulatory rudder for those cable and phone monopoly licenses.)

> Yes, no telecom should be the only telecom in a region, but each telecom is granted an exclusivity (monopoly) on a particular utility line: cable companies are given (in most regions) exclusive rights to a region's originally TV focused fiber and coax cables and phone companies are given (in most regions) exclusive rights to a region's originally phone-focused fiber and coax cables.

That's a weird way of phrasing it. Cable companies own their lines because they paid to build them. But they haven't been "intentionally granted monopolies" as you claimed above, because another provider could come in and build lines and provide service. (Power companies, by contrast, generally do have a monopoly in that sense.)

It's a high cost investment to build any such lines. There's only so much space in most area's utility corridors (poles, trenches, what have you).

This has always been called a "natural monopoly": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

Most regions are aware that cable and/or phone lines form a natural monopoly, and thus intentionally granted that monopoly, placing regulatory bodies just as they did power, water, etc.

Just look at how badly Google Fiber is failing some cities to see how hard it is for "another provider could come in and build lines and provide service". It may be "slightly" easier to have competing cable providers than competing power companies (though keep in mind early America did have more competing power companies in some regions), but it's not that much easier, it's still a natural monopoly.

WorldMaker's answer to this comment is great. I would TL;DR it by saying that while there are always multiple phone companies to choose from, there is usually only one cable or fiber internet company, which is what matters.

In every state I've ever lived, for example, Comcast is the only company that provides acceptable internet speeds. DSL and satellite providers don't even come close enough to count as competition. So Comcast has the localized monopoly on the infrastructure necessary to actually provide a good product.

Much more regulated. And the T-Mobile + Sprint deal did get a lot of scrutiny, much more than any tech acquisition has ever gotten.

They're also currently much better regulated

They are? Recent history suggests it's way easier for a random person to build a successful search engine (e.g. DuckDuckGo) than a successful telecom, and I have way more choice of search engine than telecom.

I definitely won't argue that telecoms play fair, but there are high barriers to entry for starting a telecom. If you start a new telecom only to compete for customers with an existing telecom in a certain area, you have to pay a huge expense to build out your network and your upside will be limited by the ensuing price war.

Not arguing that starting a telecom is easier than a search engine, but I think a large part of that difficulty is inherent to the industry.

You’re describing point by point exactly why they’re dangerous monopolies. It’s hard, incumbents have advantage, and even if you do it, incumbents will undercut you because they are already well situated. Consumers have no choice; incumbents frequently at the receiving end of the worst consumer satisfaction. Oh, and taxpayers also paid $400B to lay that infrastructure that apparently newcomers aren’t allowed to have. And yet here we are, going after a search engine that has a dozen alternatives that are just as capable of suiting your needs and new ones able to spring up overnight. It just makes no sense. This is pure manipulation by the government.

I definitely agree with you that they are dangerous monopolies, I hope I didn't come across as defending them.

I think the overall point though is that both the telecom and search engine market experience the network effect. In a telecom's case, the effect is more literal. For search engines, they increase in value as they can collect data on more and more users (which increases the value of the search engine to the users and the cycle continues). Saying that there are dozens of alternatives to me is like saying there are dozens of alternatives to Facebook. There are, but my Grandma isn't on them so do I really care?

I think that the network effect is really hard to regulate around effectively. Just look at Bell. the resulting companies from the Bell antitrust case are the same companies we are discussing as having monopolies on internet access. I absolutely agree that we have an issue, but I just don't know of a solution.

I disagree that the network effect in Google is anywhere near as substantial as Facebook. You don’t have a social network without your friends on it. You can definitely crawl the internet and make an index out of the cross references and build a search engine out of it. It may be worse at first but that’s because of the data you mine from users, right? So either this whole privacy thing is overblown and it’s really necessary to collect data to make a really great product or no one should be able to in which case Google holds little monopoly power over a newcomer that doesn’t have any of this data.

What? The fact that they sell oodles of information about me to just about anyone?