Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/16/derelict-fcc.html
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"My ISP is peeing on me"
Title of my forth coming song.
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Conservatives: states’s rights are good when discriminating against human racial minority persons but bad when discriminating against legal fiction corporate persons.
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I’d love to hear some of these songs someday.
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I, for one,
second the motion,
unless there’s a third way,
(short of pleading the fifth)
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Wasn’t monopoly a bad thing? Or was that just hypothetical monopolies? The ones that only make hypothetical campaign contributions?
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A “former Verizon executive”? He was an associate general counsel for 2 years, 15 years ago. His resume really does get more amazing in the telling.
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So much not an expert here… but it seems to me that the problem with monopolies is that the public has no possible feedback. You can’t “shop somewhere else” to inform the company that you don’t like what they’re doing/selling/etc. With a service provided by the government, you might also not like what they’re doing, but (presumably) you have some measure of control over them via political or democratic means. You can call your representatives, vote for someone else, and so on. This is, of course, a problem if most citizens like what they offer. If you’re in a minority that (say) doesn’t like… I don’t know… how the sewer system works, you’re out of luck.
As a practical matter, it’s very hard to affect how government does its work, so a government monopoly is hard for citizens to change.
The best mix is probably something sensible (horrors!) like reserving government action for services that either make so little profit that the private sector has no interest (basic science), or for where you think all citizens, regardless of ability to pay, are entitled to (medicine). I suppose the government could subsidize a slim-profit service, so that there can be private competition with more profit incentive. It all depends.
While private (for-profit) monopolies are quite often bad, public monopolies (basically, socialism in action, at the most basic level) are quite often good. The government doesn’t have a profit motive, that simple, and monopolies DO save on a lot of costs (administration and distribution, especially); they are quite often the most efficient way to get essential services to the citizenry, if not always.
The real problem appears when any monopolistic organization engages in anticompetitive behavior, especially when that monopoly is doing so as part of a profit motive. If they do not do so, however, they actually are perfectly legal. That makes sense, of course; if you are the FIRST provider of a service or product, for example, you naturally have a de facto monopoly on said service/product, and the same can happen if your service/product just happens to be vastly superior to any other offering ^^’.
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