Comments on: How Many Competitors Is Enough?

By: dm

dm — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 02:30:22 +0000

Thanks, I'd overlooked long-distance service. I'll happily concede the possibility that long-distance service wasn't a natural monopoly. More likely, it was a natural monopoly, but was shorter lived before being made obsolete by technology. As far as I know, ATT lost its monopoly shortly after someone else had a business need that led to having excess long-distance transmission capacity to sell (which was when the Southern Pacific Railroad laid optical fiber for their own internal signalling, and realized they had excess capacity they could sell to people).

By: dm

dm — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 22:30:22 +0000

By: dm

dm — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 21:30:22 +0000

By: Tim Lee

Tim Lee — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 21:45:08 +0000

AT&T pretty clearly enjoyed a monopoly, enforced by the government. For several decades the FCC specifically prohibited anyone from offering competing long distance service, for example.

By: dm

dm — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 01:35:40 +0000

No, I don't mean AT&T. But they weren't a monopoly — I'm sure a Tim Lee of the era would be happy to point out that there were hundreds of local phone companies. It was just that there was only one phone company in any given market, because stringing a second set of wires increased costs without increasing utility.

By: Jayel Aheram

Jayel Aheram — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 02:14:57 +0000

Wired phone service was a good example for close to a century.

You meat AT&T? They were hardly natural.

By: dm

dm — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 19:50:25 +0000

It took me a while to figure out what you meant by "the left's seemingly contradictory attitude regarding competition and monopolies".

It's simple, really --- the only legitimate monopoly is a natural one. Wired phone service was a good example for close to a century, as were things like power distribution, natural gas lines, water and sewerage in urban areas.

Technology can work, given time, to make natural monopolies no longer natural, of course, which is only to be encouraged --- much as ARPA (strongly) encouraged the creation of open standards in computer communications, creating an environment (the Internet) where many companies could create products and services.

By: Jayel Aheram

Jayel Aheram — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 18:03:35 +0000

I never really understood the left's seemingly contradictory attitude regarding competition and monopolies. On one hand, competition is desirable and consolidation of the markets in the hands of a few companies is a cause for government intervention.

Or maybe the only legitimate monopoly is a statist one?