| Wow, thank you - I've never heard that argument before. I'm not sure I know of an intelligent right-leaning person who thinks monopolies of any kind is a good idea, but I can see the argument being used in a "stepping-stone" sense towards a Republican ideal less regulated environment that would "naturally eradicate" monopolies. I can see it used like that, but I've never heard of it. Of course, that might be because I'm not from the US. Also, I don't necessarily agree that ISPs are closer to the state in most places, but that's not worth talking about because as far as I can see, neither of us agree with the argument anyway, you only enlightened me to its existence. But like you said yourself, how this is linked to populist anti-globalism is not clear. The original poster said,
> "It goes along with the Trump political theme of anti-globalization." So that's really the question at hand. At this point, it feels to me like the original poster is just virtue-signalling, which baffles me. |
Depends on the structure, but a lot of them are inheritors of telcos, which were often nationalised and/or subject to state control, surveillance and censorship. I was thinking particularly of BT and its heir Openreach, which owns all the wires. While they may be privatized the oversight is a lot closer than that of SV startups.
Owning a lot of physical infrastructure and needing to dig up roads requires having a good working relationship with the authorities, at least. Whereas to be Facebook you don't even need a local presence in the country.
Or there are the various US telcos which effectively lobby for either direct monopoly grants from cities or laws against city-level broadband. This kind of thing: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has-al...