These are good points but you're leaving off the fact that these companies paid off State legislatures to make competition illegal in various ways. Particularly stopping people in a city or state from using tax dollars to fund something better. It's banned in some with only the local utility able to do it in others. Plus, the big companies got billions in tax subsidies to build their networks with promise of getting broadband to about everyone.
Quite a lot of corruption by a cartel of a few instead of laissez-faire.
Exactly. Businesses will use whatever means at their disposal to remove competition, whether that's government, financial, and even morally reprehensible actions at the expense of others.
My point is that even if companies weren't able to leverage government to reduce competition, they'd find other mechanisms to accomplish the same goal, such as just buying up all the competition.
Think about it. If you're a competitor and trying to make profit, how better to do that than to consolidate with the big players until one player gains significant control over the market to demand whatever price they wish to maximize their profit?
I think the counter point is: What's stopping another player from entering the market? They can only keep buying up the competition if the competition is always willing to sell. More over, the ability to buy up the competition presumes a sufficient surplus of profits to be able to do that in perpetuity. Another large actor (say, Google), could recognize this and enter the market without any intention of selling (only of capturing those surplus profits).
To be clear I'm not for any ideology here -- my point above is to get at what I want to discuss: Is Comcast mostly crappy because of their (regulation provided) monopoly? Do those (particular) regulations exist for good reason? If not, can we work on removing them to level the playing field? (I hope Yes / No / Yes, but don't know!)
> Is Comcast mostly crappy because of their (regulation provided) monopoly? Do those (particular) regulations exist for good reason? If not, can we work on removing them to level the playing field?
1. Yes. Consider the cities where Comcast had to compete with G. Fiber and see how much faster the speeds they are offering are.
2. They exist for good reason for Comcast, not so much for everyone else. And Comcast spent a good deal of money to lobby policymakers to install those regulations in the first place. The government didn't just mandate them out of the blue.
3. You can work on removing them if you have a comparable level of access to policymakers as Comcast does. Do you?
So... which countries have very good competition on wired Internet services without Government forcing competitors to share infrastructure, or otherwise subsidize competition? If free market capitalism had that result when applied to this market, you'd think at least one country would exist somewhere.
Who were they buying the uplink from? When the company that owns the cables is also a retail ISP, selling cheap uplink to another retail ISP is never a good idea.
EDIT: From reading a bit, it looks like these neighbourhood ISPs managed to get off the ground and develop significant clout before the telecoms companies managed to start providing consumer retail broadband services?
Quite a lot of corruption by a cartel of a few instead of laissez-faire.