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by alexasmyths 3130 days ago
No, absolutely not.

In the ultimate 'free market' - your healthcare would be priced based on your earnings, and it would be ~90% of your after tax take home pay. Why? Because you'll pay.

There's good reason we generally don't allow price discrimination, or things like collusion, it's not rocket science.

If the Telcos could price discriminate willy nilly over the information that goes through their pipes - then 100% of the profits of the company you work for will disappear into their bank accounts.

Imagine if some private entity owned all of the roads - and the toll was based on your income?

You can't talk about 'free markets' in such a cavalier manner.

FYI - there is one issue with 'Quality of Service' - which completely confuses the question above. Telcos must be able to discriminate based on this - i.e. lower latency, higher bandwidth = more cost. But they should be banned from looking at the contents of the traffic, or billing based on source/destination.
1 comments
averagewall 3130 days ago
> it would be ~90% of your after tax take home pay. Why? Because you'll pay.

What's to stop a competitor offering it for 89%? And so on until the market finds its fair price.

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alexasmyths 3130 days ago
Because there is an oligarchy in broadband and in many other industries and massive barriers to entry as well.

In broadband, it would be completely stupid for carriers to compete on price because ultimately - they are competing with themselves. You reduce prices one day - the next you have to go lower - and so on.

It's better if they keep prices high and compete on other things.

It's easy to have implicit collusion if they are only 2 or 3 players.

Often, due to access rights there might not really be any competition in specific areas.

I worked at a small telecom switch company. We made a lot of gear that didn't make any sense just to get around regulations.

Example: we made a very expensive voice and dsl and t1 switch on a board. It was crazy expensive, didn't make sense. But the carrier wanted it, because if they had individual DSL cards (or something like that) - they'd have to allow CLEC (local exchange carriers) to compete. So they paid 2x for their networking gear to avoid competition.

The big money is in monopolies, oligarchies, and keeping competition away through legislation, barriers to entry etc..

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