[crote]

That's just repeating the problem - or even making it worse.

Land is still finite, so there will be competition for portal locations. Connectivity is valuable, so land with easy access to a lot of portals will raise in value: who wants to walk through 20 portals when you could also reach your destination in 1 or 2? This means there is a very strong incentive for the formation of a portal monopoly or cartel.

Anyone in control of a central portal hub is able to make a lot of money by opening a new portal from that hub to a far-off location. That far-off location was previously worthless, but the presence of a portal suddenly makes it extremely valuable. And being able to charge people for portal passage makes it even worse: Not only can you profit from land speculation, you're now basically charging rent on the land you sold too!

The only way to really work around this is to have essentially infinite land, accessible from a single central portal. But as the linked article mentions, that's quite immersion-breaking.

[aspenmayer]

This train of thought reminds me a lot of Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth Saga, in which wormhole technology is discovered by a duo not unlike Jobs and Wozniak, and commercialized, and arguably monopolized. As a result, this leads to considerable differences in opinion about the proper usage of wormhole technology in the setting between the two founders and in the wider society.

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