Allowing nVidia to become a monopoly would bite the US in the ass strategically, as nVidia loses incentive to innovate.

That's how the US, effectively, ended up having no viable aircraft when it entered WWI, after being the country that invented the thing. (Wright and Curtiss, IIRC, locked the market with patents).

Or, more closely, how the US telecom/Internet infrastructure is atrocious, despite — and because of — the Internet and the telephone being invented here. Go figure, Ma Bell wasn't the bees knees.

Strategically, the US needs someone to keep nVidia up on their toes. Innovation cuts into profit margins when you have a monopoly.

Nvidia is reasltically already a monopoly with CUDA. They don’t need to innovate and they force universities to use their more expensive GPUs.

They're constantly innovating, and have monthly software releases. Don't blame NVIDIA because AMD can't offer a solid enterprise offering that is attractive to customers.

But not the other baby bells, which is the point. Also, Apple went to Cingular after being rebuffed by Verizon. (Apple wanted no crapware. Verizon said no.) Competition working.

Because both of these are provably false.

As is that nVidia is already a monopoly.

Anti monopoly laws are useless, x86-64 is a duopoly, and any monopoly laws aren’t able to stop Amazon and their vertical intergration, because the argument is that eBay and other sites exist. Network oligarchs collaborate to fix prices.

The USPS is required to deliver to everyone, even when it doesn't make monetary sense to do so. They are an important piece of US infrastructure.

They are also incredibly constrained by legislation. They aren't allowed to just raise prices as needed.

> The agency is burdened by hundreds of billions of dollars in debt and falling revenue, and Congress and the White House have signaled an unwillingness to grant more funding without major restructuring, lawmakers say.

> The law envisioned the Postal Service as a self-sustaining agency whose revenue could cover the expenses associated with an aging workforce involved in a physical occupation: delivering packages and parcels to every address in the country.

> Not even two decades later, it can’t. The Postal Service has racked up $160.9 billion in debt from what’s owed prepaying retiree benefits. On top of that, it has many years’ worth of operating deficits, as its top revenue generators no longer covered the costs of delivering the mail.

Then why do they need bailouts? Are these bailouts self funding? What money gave them that credit when they were long unsustainable? This is an unnatural monopoly that doesn’t allow competitors and also is a failure who mostly delivers worthless physical spam you cannot escape.

Because unlike any other company or agency, they are required to prepay retiree benefits.

Anyway, you might be surprised to hear that our Army and Navy aren't self-sustaining. Obviously, we should cut their funding and see how they manage to make their nukes pay for themselves. /s

If you don't get the difference between 401K and what the USPS was required to provide, you are deliberately obtuse, and are arguing in bad faith.

>The USPS already uses private carriers for remote places.

It's the other way around. I guess that settles the "if" in the above.

Also we kinda want to keep territories like Alaska inhabited because geopolitics.

And we kinda want the people living in those places to be able to get their official government documents (driver licenses, court notices, etc).

Then there's this idea of voting by mail, which isn't something that should be a privilege, but that's too complex for our discussion.

To translate one of the reasons for USPS into words you may understand: you know how two-factor authentication requires that second factor? The USPS provides a means for the gov to get that second factor into the hands of the people.

A third party would be a man-in-the-middle.

So consiser USPS a part of the government's 2FA infrastructure and messaging system with SLA and proof of delivery.

That, unlike your company's authentication infrastructure, happens to pay for itself.

Natural monopolies are things like electric power grid and water supply and train and roads, they last forever precisely because they are natural and they were never leapfrogged in history. 'Natural" part stands for nessesary inveatment in infrastructure being redundant and causing zero-sum game.

Kodak wasn't much of a monopoly and certainly wasn't a natural one

Read up on how antitrust actually works, your assesment of USPS is equally inaccurate

My totally uninformed opinion is that basically the only IP law that's worth a damn is trademarks (which should absolutely be very strongly enforced. It's crucially important that consumers know who they're buying from for the market to work properly), and maybe copyright on /entertainment/ focused creative works for the life of the author and no longer.

All "developing" nations don't (and shouldn't) GAF about IPRs during that phase in their development. Notice that China didn't GAF for years, but does now, both from a control POV and from a competition POV.

Countries only worry about IPRs when they have sufficient IP development to have something to sell.