Comment by HauntingPin
4 hours ago
Sometimes I wonder if whoever writes these comments understands the words their using.
> No it doesn't, and you just proved it
What exactly did they prove? You didn't substantiate or explain this at all. Leverage would be relevant if they were negotiating a deal. They weren't. The company laid down fibre because of what they saw as a potential competitor (municipal fibre). The municipality didn't use the threat of fibre to come to terms with the monopolistic company. That would've been leverage. But they didn't, so it wasn't leverage. The municipality created the appearance of competition and the monopoly behaved accordingly as if there were a potential competitor.
So this shows competition works, but I thought the original post was about the free market. When the two companies were asked to fill a need for the people, they refused, and the people were not otherwise about to independently provide the service based on their own funds. I feel as though if the only way of getting companies to do something without organic competition is to use underhanded methods (such as lying about another competitor), then the free market has some places for improvement, no?
> What exactly did they prove?
They proved that the Free Market doesn't automatically provide functional competition, if you think about it, the Western-style free market is very keen on creating and maintaining monopolies, even cheating isn't going to help you here.
> The company laid down fibre because of what they saw as a potential competitor (municipal fibre).
The OP is about free market failures, not about competition. As another example, many people have pointed out that there is much more competition in China than in the US. Hope, this is enough for you to understand the difference.
The OP is about telecom. I took a look and learned [1]:
> The telecommunications industry in China is dominated by three state-run businesses: China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile.
A little slippery to bring China into the telecom free market discussion and contrast it with “Western-style” while failing to mention the structure of its telecom industry.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_industry_in...
> The OP is about telecom. I took a look and learned [1]:
Untrue - in the context of the OP, telecom is just an example. Look at the title.
> The telecommunications industry in China is dominated by three state-run businesses: China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile.
"More competition" doesn't mean "no monopolization". Communications are political everywhere, I'd be surprised if they were a subject of less control in China than in the US. However, even on Amazon and even with tariffs, there's more competition between Chinese sellers than between sellers of other origins.
Western free market doesn’t create monopolies. Where did you get that idea?
The only place monopolies tend to emerge is heavily regulated areas that allow for regulatory capture (laying fiber is a great example of this).
> Western free market doesn’t create monopolies.
To quote myself: "the Western-style free market is very keen on creating and maintaining monopolies"
Guess who's the highly influential investor, with strong connection to the WH who said the following:
"Competition is for losers".
This sums up pretty well what the free market is keen on.
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Or in places where network effects make it impossible to compete.
> ...one day, one of the municipal counselors just called up a friend who worked for a fiber laying company and asked them for a favor: put out a press release saying that they were “investigating” laying an undersea fiber to power a municipal fiber network on the little island.
They called in a favor that put pressure on the company from public expectations.
Yes. What do you think happens in a competitive marketplace? Sony heard about Nintendo partnering up with Philips for the SNES CD expansion, so Sony made their own console. That's literally competition.
The details of how the "public pressure" came to be don't matter, because the monopoly didn't know about that. All they knew was there was a potential competitor, so they behaved according to that information. That's how it works.
I don't understand this line of thinking. The spreading of a false rumor is an example of a competitive marketplace? If this took place in a different domain wouldn't it be fraud? That it was in the public benefit seems orthogonal.
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Frankly, I think you're trying to poke holes in a straightforward concept. And now you've dug your heels in and you're trying to justify it. But... let's ignore opinions and interpretations...
> Sony heard about Nintendo partnering up with Philips for the SNES CD expansion, so Sony made their own console
This is completely inaccurate in every way possible. You even have the order of events backwards (Nintendo and Sony partnered first). There is in no way in which even the most charitable interpretation of this statement could bear out. Just about the only correct part is that you have some (but not all!) of the relevant parties involved.
If you're wrong about such a well documented, cut and dry matter of historical record, then what else are you wrong about? :)
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Sometimes commenters all over the internet write like this because they just got incredibly jealous after reading the parent post. I've been thinking more and more about how most posts are jealous or depressed outtakes against the world, system, or other person. This fundamental human behavior won't change, and is as reflexive as a monopolistic company reacting to a press release, proving the parent correct despite their scathing response of the child.
It's worth noting that 4chan and Reddit also live here because both sites are insufferable.