[chrismcb]

Because it isn't a free market in the USA. And those that regulate it don't seem to care. Or maybe it is those that have been granted a monopoly do everything they can to retain said monopoly. Things would be different if we actually had a free market

[schubidubiduba]

Some markets just inherently turn non-free very quickly when left unsupervised. Especially infrastructure markets.

[simoncion]

Most markets inherently turn non-free when left unsupervised. That's the insight that folks like Keynes came to (as does any honest, informed observer with two or more functioning brain cells). That's why anti-trust and competition-preserving regulators and laws are essential. Without them, a very few powerful players form [0] cartels and/or tri/du/monopolies and enrich themselves vastly out of proportion with the value that they provide to their customers.

[0] ...often legally protected...

[intalentive]

There won’t be anti-trust as long as elections can be bought and there’s a revolving door between regulators and industry. We need a firewall to separate capital and state.

[jatora]

Yep. But everyone's realized this ship has sailed in the US right? Regulatory capture is complete.

[nothinkjustai]

No they don’t. What happens is that people want to manipulate the market for a variety of reasons, so they do that, and then really really smart people come along later and try to claim that those manipulators weren’t actually the problem but the solution! It is completely backwards, like reversing cause and effect. It’s like blaming a person for standing in the path of a bullet instead of the one firing the gun.

Want a free market? Stop messing with it.

[simoncion]

> No they don’t.

Yes, they do. Price competition and R&D are expensive activities. Businesses seek to maximize profit, as they're not charities or governmental entities. Neutralizing competition (whether by eliminating it or colluding with it) and entering into private agreements with suppliers and vendors to box out any potential upstarts increases profit. Another fine way for a monopoly or cartel to increase profit is to make their product cheaper to produce by adulterating it with inferior ingredients, but mislead customers about the fact of the quality loss, the reason for the quality loss, or both.

The natural stable state of a profit-seeking business is the establishment of a monopoly or cartel. You get the most profit when there is neither a need to compete on price nor a need to expend resources on improving one's product.

[nothinkjustai]

That isn’t really true though, monopolies are not sustainable. Pretty much the only way to create a long lived monopoly is to collude with the government (also a monopoly btw).

[simoncion]

> ...monopolies are not sustainable.

You might be surprised to learn that the private sector can enter into durable agreements much like the public sector does. It's how things like mon/oligopolies and cartels form and persist.

Anyway. I'd suggest you go read your histories, but you're either unlikely to, or don't have enough supporting information to understand what they're telling you. If you're young enough [0] to be alive thirty to sixty years from now, and you're living in a place -like the US- that's steadily dismantling its consumer protection regulations, then do pay attention to how things have changed between now and near to the end of your life. Take especial care to track down the root causes of the differences, rather than just uncritically swallowing whatever explanations you're handed.

[0] ...and lucky enough...

[db48x]

That may or may not be true, but in this case many cities signed exclusivity agreements with cable companies in the 60s and 70s when cable was becoming popular. Back then it was not technically feasible to have multiple cable companies sharing the same cable; the same set of analog channels had to be broadcast to every subscriber. Multiple subscribers, often hundreds of them in apartments, were attached to the same run of coaxial cable in a daisy chain or using splitters. Those agreements carried over to internet service once the cable companies started offering it. It made sense 50 years ago, but today it means that we haven’t actually had much of a free market. Now the FTTH is cheap and readily available, that is starting to reverse simple because the monopoly agreements only apply to _cable_ networks, not to fiber networks.

[hibikir]

And even with a free market, there's areas where making up the investment would be difficult, because the amount of effort divided by the number of likely subscribers, still wouldn't pencil out for 20+ years. A lot of Americans live in suburbs that are just low density enough that updating the infra to get fiber anywhere near the house is expensive, and then you might have quite a bit of fiber specific to that one subscriber. The difference in how much infrastructure you need vs a city is substantial.

[chaostheory]

Yes, the duopolies are due to regulatory capture in the US.

A lot of ISPs need permitting that they will never get in order to enter a new market/location.

[littlestymaar]

Free market enthusiasts' reasoning is literary the same as Communists': when their grand theory fails to deliver its grandiose promises, it's nver because their believes where nonsensical, but because “it isn't real Communism/free market”.

[emtel]

Communist regimes, especially the USSR, had nearly unlimited power to impose exactly the policies that supposedly would help.

Open societies, in contrast, must balance many competing interests and voting factions, meaning that free market supporters have limited power to enact their preferred policies, meaning they rarely can be implemented in a “pure” form.

[intalentive]

That’s a nice story. In reality the “open society” is open to takeover by international finance capital. It’s like running a server with “admin”:”password” SSH credentials — a security vulnerability that cedes control to outsiders. Imagine China and Iran allowing Larry Ellison to own their media, or allowing Larry Fink to control a big chunk of their markets, or allowing George Soros to manipulate their currency and operate NGOs within their borders. That would be plainly idiotic and suicidal.

“Open society!” coos the fox to the henhouse. LOL, no thanks!

[0x3f]

Seems pretty reasonable to me. Is your contention that we _have_ achieved some pure form of free markets or Communism?

[littlestymaar]

The thing is none of the “pure forms” are realistic outside of books.

If your system needs absolute theoretical purity to work, then it's worthless. And that's true of both communism and free market.

[0x3f]

I'm not sure this is true. What you're describing is the local optimum problem. Yes, the local optimum is better if you can't push through to a better one, of course. And heading merely 'towards' the better optimum often makes things immediately worse. But that doesn't make the better optima worthless, or ever-unreachable.

It seems a bit like saying humans will never fly. It's a question of technology level, in the sense that governance is a form of economic technology. Which is what leaves it open to people saying it can be done better.

The best solution changes over time, essentially. It's a question of fitness to the current context.

[littlestymaar]

Until you get a technology that makes people acting perfectly rationally, with perfect information and getting marginal cost equal to average cost[1], free market is never gonna work.

And until you get a technology that prevents leadership to be egoistic and corrupt, Communism is never going to work.

I'm not holding my breath for any of those tech to happen.

[1]: interestingly enough, such a condition is pretty much antithetical to capitalism as it requires capital to be free.

[0x3f]

I'm not sure I really understand. What do you mean by "never gonna work"? Because markets obviously do largely work, despite the fact that people are not perfectly rational and there are other inefficiencies at the edges. They have their degenerate cases, of course, but I don't think anyone would say markets "don't work" in general.

Most successful economies are largely market-based, as things stand today. Even the successful command economies (i.e. China) use markets extensively.

Unless you mean perfectly free markets will never be perfect resource allocators. Well yes, perhaps, but what does that matter if there's no perfect solution? The nudges required to 'fix' markets are a form of technology, as discussed. As such, it either exists and is effective or not.

[thesmtsolver2]

Totally, tons of govt. regulation and interference is what defines a free market. /s