[jmkerr]

> "(Europe has over 100 mobile operators, compared with a handful in America or China.) These lack the economies of scale and opportunities to grow quickly enjoyed by firms plying the American or Chinese markets."

This is such a bad example, I count 6 European carriers with more subscribers than AT&T.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_network_operato...

> "These internal barriers mean Europe has many smaller firms operating at national, not continental, scale."

Looks like they're not interested in continental scale because they're already at global scale with together 1.4B subscriptions.

I generally agree with the point but this is a bad example.

[j_wtf_all_taken]

Also, don't Americans complain all the f**ing time how bad their broadband internet is?

[Applejinx]

Rightly so. It's absolutely pathetic, and it's because of the lack of competition through the scale of those who own and control the market, combined with the government keeping their hands off the market-controllers.

Purely rent-seeking and stagnant. Pathetic. Damagingly awful.

[ChuckNorris89]

German and Austrian broadband is equally worse.

[microtonal]

Because of a lack of competition, it’s the same issue as the US, but at a smaller scale (at least in most areas you can subscribe to multiple ISPs).

E.g. in The Netherlands you can subscribe to a large number of ISPs. In the largest part of the country either through *DSL or cable. Increasingly also fiber. This is because the government regulated internet access very early on. When the state telephone company was privatized, they were forced to make the infrastructure available to others.

The power of real competition (in contrast to ‘winner takes all’) should not be underestimated. As a result of a free market + some government regulation, anyone in the country can subscribe to an ISP that actually cares about their customers.

Xs4all was a provider that literally grew out of the hacker community and proactively fought for their user’s freedom and privacy rights (e.g. by supporting subscribers in court who were sued by Scientology for revealing information about the Church of Scientology on their Xs4all webpage).

At any rate, at some point Xs4all was bought by one of the largest ISPs (KPN). For a very long time they operated as an independent unit, continuing their strong stance on ethics. The last few years, they have been assimilated more and more by KPN. A few former employees and other supporters decided to start a new ISP, freedom.nl, that carries on the privacy/freedom angle of Xs4all. And with relatively little capital investment they are now up and running and anyone living in The Netherlands can subscribe to them.

This is only possible in a market where regulation enforces real competition. I thing regulated capitalism is one of the strengths of Europe. It may not always result in the best outcome for shareholders, but it’s definitely great for the general population.

Do we always get it right? No. I lived in Germany for 5 years, and indeed, the ISP options and quality were pretty miserable.

[j_wtf_all_taken]

Yeah it heavily depends where you live, in Germany. In or near larger cities, there's lots of really good options.

Its funny how Germany was ruled for 16 years now by a party whose voters live mostly in rural areas, but didn't do a lot for those areas ...

[imtringued]

>Its funny how Germany was ruled for 16 years now by a party whose voters live mostly in rural areas, but didn't do a lot for those areas ...

It's the same with trump. He mostly cared about himself. The only thing he did right for his voterbase is starting the trade war. From a pragmatic standpoint the tradewar was necessary, even if it's not the best thing you could possibly do. The point is that the economy is very slow, the short term can last decades. Hoping for an economic recovery that pulls up everyone will happen one day but not within the term of any politicians of today. A tradewar is a quick hack to achieve full employment.

[j_wtf_all_taken]

Its interesting that you get downvoted just for saying that we should have government regulation that leads to working markets with a healthy competition making things better for people.

> I thing regulated capitalism is one of the strengths of Europe. It may not always result in the best outcome for shareholders, but it’s definitely great for the general population.

yeaaaah :)

[jmkerr]

This is a discussion about market share, not quality.