[omegaworks]

>Serving your customers well is entirely out of self interest

This general tenet starts to break down the fewer competitors operate in the market. Monopolization allows corps to capture supernormal profit and externalize as much cost as possible. When there's only one person that's got what you need, they can treat you how they want.

tl;dr: Comcast.

[nickik]

A common argument against AnCapism is the idea that monopoly will form and eventually there is a sort of superstate.

This is of course a old marxist argument, capital is inherently centralising.

There are however good reason to believe this is not true. In fact, most economist don't follow this line of thinking anymore.

No AnCap would deny that there would be some larger then healthy cooperations but its an acceptable problem that is pretty hard to solve for any system and is often made worse by state based systems.

[snrplfth]

Well, Comcast's oligopoly is largely established by the fact that rights-of-way and pole-attachment rights are monopolized by municipalities, which tend to approve only a single, or few providers. It's not a natural monopoly.

[pdonis]

> Comcast's oligopoly is largely established by the fact that rights-of-way and pole-attachment rights are monopolized by municipalities, which tend to approve only a single, or few providers.

Only because, when municipalities do try to treat bandwidth as a public utility, which they can sell to all providers equally, Comcast and other large ISPs sue them.

> It's not a natural monopoly.

I agree, but I don't think it is primarily local municipalities that are propping it up.

[snrplfth]

I think it's the structure of rights-of-way, pole-attachments and so forth as monopolies that props it up. The fact that municipalities get sued for trying to sell bandwidth is a problem, but it emerges, I think, because of the fact it's centralized in a government institution.

[pdonis]

To some extent, provisioning for bandwidth is a natural monopoly, for the same reason that provisioning for electrical service, water, sewer, and other utilities are natural monopolies. It doesn't make sense to run multiple different electrical, water, and sewer services to the same neighborhood just so multiple different providers can compete; the costs of all that extra infrastructure are too high. The costs aren't as high for bandwidth, but they aren't zero either.

As the size of the "municipality" goes up, though, I agree with you that centralization creates monopolies that are not natural.