I worked in IT for a large telco for four years that has a monopoly on an extremely large part of Canada.

After years there, learning the insides, working closely with marketing and sales and all the rest…..I agree with you 100%.

They literally have guaranteed teed profits in the form of VERY large government subsides. Of course they chase them, so instead of FTTH or other interesting initiatives they were hell bent on installing fax lines and copper because they had enormous subsidies.

Canadians love their monopolies full stop. It's a cultural issue where each sector has its handful of heavyweights, of which you have a choice of 1 or 2 to use locally, and even if there is a third option most Canadians just won't consider it.

Comparatively, the US has thousands of small banks & credit unions, and tons of small and midsize ISPs that provide a 3rd or 4th option in areas like MDUs where they can make a go of it.

They won capitalism? The government regulations are entirely responsible for the lack of competition.

As it stands, competition found away around the wired line regulations. The wireless devices came along. And soon the satellite networks will give the cellphone carriers a real kick in the pants.

Nope, you can’t the-free-market-will-fix-everything this one. The telco lobbyists wrote the government regulations. Wireless is slow and coverage is spotty. Satellite is unreliable, expensive, and has a fixed latency cost that can’t be eliminated.

> The telco lobbyists wrote the government regulations.

This is the issue. There isn't a free market in this (or many) sectors because of regulatory capture. If that were gone, if competition was even possible, then we would see improvement.

We wouldn't necessarily see improvement, especially in a deregulated Telecom environment where you order new service and the technician gets you installed but knocks your neighbors on a competitor out of service, resulting in them scheduling a tech who knocks you out of service.

Physical networks like this also clutter up the skies or create areas you can't dig in, and accrue damage while decreasing in value each year until they are abandoned or upgraded.

Abandoned Telecom infrastructure is a serious issue all its own as well, no one wants legacy unused cabling running under their streets or in their building.

> Nope, you can’t the-free-market-will-fix-everything this one. The telco lobbyists wrote the government regulations

Just a point of clarification, the free market generally means independence from government regulation. This isn't the free market failing so much as incumbents using the power of government to force their advantage, part of the argument of the free market is that by not allowing the government to interfere in this manner no one can get laws written to benefit them because the government doesn't get involved in the first place. Now granted that's in a frictionless airless world with spherical cows. But to say the free market failed and the very next sentence say it is because of regulation from the government is oxymoronic.

Even in this version of the free market, monopoly is still the incentive and end goal. Eventually, either a single player wins out (possibly by buying or merging with previous competitors) or a few big players agree that colluding with each other is more profitable then competing (remember there is no government interfering in this free market to prevent this). Once this happens, new players won't enter the market because they can immediately be crushed by the incumbent.

So either way, monopoly is the inevitable end point.

Monopoly is only an incentive if it is clear that it will be permitted.

But it always is though. In a government regulated economy, there is regulatory capture and lobbying to create industry friendly laws that allow monopoly (aka our current system). In a fully free market, then there is no laws to prevent monopoly.

And by monopoly, I am also referring to systems where there are a few big players that just don't compete against one another, or one where there is a big player and a few small but inconsequential players. All of these result in the same effect as plain monopoly.

Especially with natural monopolies like infrastructure, there is no economic case to overbuild most power grids, water/sewer districts, Telecom infrastructure or natural gas networks regardless of regulation.

The rare times you see overbuilding there is always a scheme involved, whether it's Comcast's recent edge outs to appear as though they aren't bleeding internet customers, or government money incentivising an overbuild cause the current ISP didn't document that they serve a set of addresses.

The definition of "a free market" you're offering here is one that has never existed. So we can either talk about the free markets we have (which compared to markets in other places and at other times are stupendously free) or we can talk about, yes, spherical cows.

> They won capitalism? The government regulations are entirely responsible for the lack of competition.

Capitalism isn't the absence of government regulations, you seem to have confused it with anarchism.

Capitalism is the name applied by critiics to a real world economic system existing at the time it was described based on particular structures of properry rights and the resulting class system. Government regulations systematically benefitting the dominant class is... very much one of the features widely observed to result from that system.