When my uncle had a heart attack, he wasn't in a position to shop ambulances, emergency departments, surgeons, cardiologists or anesthesiologists. As with internet providers, emergency healthcare is not a competitive market, and that's reflected in extortionate pricing.
It seems like reducing consumer harm should be the primary objective of regulators.
You're not wrong, but the definition of "consumer harm" used in practice hinges on short-termism and is price-centered right now. "This won't raise prices...for now, at least" is, by itself, an alarmingly strong argument in this arena, irrespective of market health or sustainability of competition.
The Biden administration has made some steps to counter that, we'll see if it's really a thing.
I guess I need to cut back on the heroin.
My reply wasn't asking for help to find an internet service provider. There are actual monopolists extracting monopoly rents right this minute. They're causing genuine consumer harm right now, so stopping this harm should be the priority of regulators.
Where there is no ability to access competitive offerings, these actual monopolists are a different league of economic pathology from markets where consumers can access competition by clicking around in their browsers.
But yours isn't a hard case of monopoly either, the main thing preventing you from creating a competing ISP is your local laws, which are failing antitrust to the point one wonders how they ever came to be ?!?
(We also shouldn't discount the importance of network effects.)
I have the latest dish model, live on a one acre property with a relatively large clearing, and I still struggle with the extremely wide field of view of the clear sky (no trees, hills or other occluding items) which it needs - I simply can’t get 24hrs of uninterrupted service, and performance is extremely variable. This is even after mounting it some 25ft in the air to reduce occlusion issues as much as possible. Starlink needs an unobstructed view right down to surprisingly low on the horizon for 24 hours of solid service, which many, many homes simply won’t be able to provide.
Starlink is incredible for what it is, but it’s not magic and becomes very hard to use reliably in urban areas at least with the current dishes and tech stack they are using. In many urban neighbourhoods it will be close to impossible to get a reliable 24 hrs of service unless you can knock down your neighbours homes and trees too.
Starlink is best used in situations where there are almost no other options, or as a backup connection to another more reliable one, for most people. It is not a great replacement for almost any fixed line service, if you have that option. Perhaps this changes in future, but people should stop just suggesting starlink in its current form as the panacea to all ISP problems.
Occlusion appears to be the single biggest enemy of starlink, and it’s super easily occluded - so much so, the app helps you measure/approximate the occlusion in your intended use space via your phones cameras before you buy.
There are approximately ~1 gazllion wireless internet providers where I live.
2) For many people, wireless and wireline internet providers are not substitutable.
You couldn’t get me to put up with 5G latencies because I play multiplayer video games and you couldn’t get me to put up with 5G bandwidth because I need to ship hundreds-of-gigabytes video files around and I’m not putting up with sub-gigabit upload speeds.
Just be glad you weren't around 15 years ago
Even if I didn't have symmetric gigabit, I also was working with 720p and 1080p video up until about 2013 and not 6K. Requirements shift over time.
any other examples of local monopolies
Maybe that is not legally possible where you are, but there is nothing inherent about emergency services resulting in extortionate pricing.
This feel similar to the myth of shareholder primacy. In both cases, the "agreed on standard" has little to no basis in the law, but happens to enrich the powerful and well connected over the little man.
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/08/22/so-long-to-shareh...
1. The Dodge brothers - minority shareholders in Ford Motors, wanted to set up their own automotive company. They planned to use the money from Ford's dividends to support their company.
2. Henry Ford would have liked to keep his monopoly on affordable cars. He cancelled the dividend and claimed he's going to spend the money on improving society (by selling the Model T even cheaper) as a thinly veiled excuse.
3. The courts in Michigan saw what's happening and forced Ford to issue dividends.
As you can see in that case case, it was the lack of shareholder primacy that enriched the powerful. In the last 20 centuries of human history the powerful have always crushed the little man with the excuse they are serving the public interest. Beware of anything that empowers powerful individuals (like corporate CEOs and directors) to take arbitrary actions in the name of "social responsibility".
Was this not happening before the estimated birth of Jesus of Nazareth?
Christianity couldn't have been a tool of the rich and powerful in the first century, because it only began acquiring powerful followers around the third century crisis.
FWIW that's just logic.
Whether it's de jure or de facto, the owners of something will own it to their interests.
If you had 100 dollars would you invest it into a company where the CEO could just take the entire company hostage and potentially make you lose your entire investment?
It's pretty much like that already, the CEO can run the company into the ground for funsies if they are insane.
But if the investor catches the CEO doing this they have the right to sue to prevent it from happening and the legal system and shareholder primacy are what allow for this. Otherwise, what does the concept of ownership even mean if the owner can't decide what is done with the business?
Company actions will maximize company value. Employee actions will maximize employee value. Customer actions will maximize customer value.
That's a false dichotomy. You can own something (or a share) and the purpose of it need not be "return as much value as possible, via buybacks, in the next quarter".
Also, why would investors want to invest in a company where they could not remove a ad CEO that isn't delivering returns? They would probably just reinvent shareholder primacy through investment contracts.
Which means most CEOs and boards focus on managing shareholders at least as much as anything else they do.
Thank you for asking for clarification. I realize I responded precipitously and was too cryptic to contribute anything meaningful to the discussion.
And it's a check towards their own interests. Just like the CEO acts in his own interests. I can't for the life of me understand why anyone thinks the CEO is more likely to act in the best interest of employees or society than the shareholders are.
Probably because shareholders can just care about money in the immediate term and don't need to actually care about any one company or its long term success. They may never know or even interact with the employees of that company on any meaningful level, and may have investments in several other companies including direct competitors so that if any one company tanks they'll still have other investments making them money hand over fist.
A CEO, particularly when they're a founder, might actually care about the company doing well and may personally know the people working for the company. They might care a lot more about the employees they work closely with on a daily basis as opposed to a shareholder who just watches numbers go up and down while deciding when best to sell. The CEO's day to day will change drastically if their company fails. A shareholder whose company does poorly just adjusts what they buys/sell the same as any other day.
For more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox
You are smarter than me.
Thank you for allowing me to be here on HN.
That's what happens when legislation is vague and it's up to the judiciary and/or executive to decide what it actually means. See also: Roe v. Wade and Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Standard Oil would be labeled "pro consumer" by today's crowd: cheap prices, and highly standardized products that you could rely on wherever you travel (like McDonald's or Starbucks is today). the notion that antitrust can be boiled down to "consumer harm" is new. the history isn't vague, and thereby neither is the "theory". the legislation, i'm not sure about, but since it's rooted in those two things and vagaries are easily cleared up by consulting the former.
> This is the “consumer welfare” standard, a theory as economically bankrupt as it is historically unsupportable. Let’s be clear here: The plain language of America’s antitrust laws make it very clear that Congress wanted to block monopolies because it worried about the concentration of corporate power, not just the abuse of that power. This is inarguable: Think of John Sherman stalking the floor of the Senate, railing against autocrats of trade, declaiming that “we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life.” These are not the statements of a man who liked most monopolies and merely sought to restrain the occasional monopolist who lost sight of his duty to make life better for the public.
[0]: https://archive.ph/aTv47