Re:Level3 is without peer, now what to do?
by rcthompson on Tuesday May 20, 2014 @04:50PM
(#7775099)
Anti-trust laws are not ideal, though. They effectively act as thresholds or hard lower limits on allowed competition, but they don't directly address the economies of scale and barriers to entry that push the market toward a monopoly state.
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True, the original impetus for the market monoply exclusions that exist today was to insure that someone coming into the market had a reasonable chance of making their money back. This encouraged people like Comcast to bring cable to the city. What has changed is that the Internet which was a 'ride along' on the Telephone and Cable monopolies has become more of a lifeline service. Further it has gone to the point where it supercedes both, since a home with a 1 - 3mbps Internet connection can get both phone and television services over it. This is the message that I'm bringing to the city, which is that Internet pipes have become like roads, essential for the citizens and the proper functioning of the city itself.
And given that, lets move the infrastructure into the same place, city owned/maintained raw pipes, company services accessible by those pipes.
Agreed. I have been looking now for a while for a rigorous treatment of how to deal with monopoly-related problems (hopefully this would be a summary of the current consensus among economists), are you by chance familiar with one?
Re:Level3 is without peer, now what to do?
by rcthompson on Wednesday May 21, 2014 @01:44PM
(#7779601)
Haha, no, I'm not. I only have a 1-year undergrad intro econ course plus a mathematics degree and my own intuition. I don't think I've actually read any primary literature in the econ field, only my textbook (and not much of that, either!).