When you move… Okay, when I move, here in Southern California, the landlord provides you with a sheet. It says, THIS is the phone carrier that serves the area; THIS is the cable service that operates here; THIS is the electric and water companies that you must use.
How is this not a monopoly?
Does the Fed think, “Well, if he doesn’t like Adelphia cable, he can always get a dish”? We broke up Bell, but now I’m stuck with Pacific Bell (or, granted my cel) unless I move.
So I guess the question is, What constitutes a monopoly, and why does cable, gas, electric, water and phone service not apply? If Bill Gates is guilty of monopoly when non-MS computers are FREELY AVAILABLE, then why is it legal for Pacific Bell to be my ONLY choice in phone service?
Does anyone have David Boies’ number?
JasonG
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Monopolies are not illegal
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The phone, cable, water, gas, electric are all there due to government regulations letting them be the companies for those services in your area.
IANAL…
Monopolies are not inherently illegal. If a company controls almost 100% of the market because their product is just better, that is legal.
It is when a company uses the leverage it has from its market share to squeeze out the competition that it is illegal.
But that doesn’t really answer the particulars of your question.
There are “regulated monopolies.” These are companies providing a (usually necessary) service to a community, which is given a monopoly in exchange for government regulation of pricing.
A good example is the power company. In the early days, cities realized they didn’t want seven different power companies each running power lines all over the city. That’s a major eyesore and maintenance headache.
So, they offer the permits to one company, and establish a commission which will approve/disapprove rate changes.
But now, people have come up with the bright idea that all we need is one set of lines, and individual companies can compete for the job of putting power into the system. This is called “deregulation.”
In theory, this means that an individual resident can sign up with a power provider that will offer him or her the lowest rate and lead to savings across the board. What is has actually meant, in California, is a major headache. (The argument over whether this really is deregulation and whether in the long run it will stabilize is probably occuring in GD someplace).
Summary:
Monopolies are not inherently illegal.
Abuse of monopoly is illegal.
Some monopolies are regulated by the government for community benefit.
Well, sort of. Congress keeps frittering about and bending laws.
Firstly, yes, monopolies are illegal, made so because of the greedy millionaire bastards of the past two hundred years who virtually tried to control the US and the government and almost succeeded. Their philosophy was that there was never too much profit to be made and no price could ever be too high if you owned everything the public needed.
Bell telephone was actually a beginner Monopoly, meaning that it kept prices low, kept introducing new, cheaper technology, provided excellent service and did not tag a bunch of additional charges on your bill. Bell had high standards. When AT&T, a then much smaller company started griping because it did not get enough of the pie, it pushed congress to break up Maw Bell and allow others in. They did, and our phone bills promptly jumped up, our service dropped and all sorts of strange charges now appear on the bill. Plus, all sorts of splinter, crappy Maw and Paw companies sprang up dealing in pay phone services and Maw Bell ripped out it’s pay phones because these companies were giving kickbacks to install there’s at businesses. So, the 20 cent phone call went up to 35 cents, the service and equipment sucks, repairing the phones take forever and if you’re not careful, they’ll sucker you into using a different long distance calling company that costs more than the one you use.
So much for breaking up a monopoly because AT&T was pissed. We all got screwed.
Cable companies are allowed local monopolies because most towns cannot support two plus they cannot use each others lines. The State must have at least two operational cable companies with roughly equal amounts of territory to avoid harboring a monopoly. So, you’re screwed again because no matter what cable company you use, you are absolutely at their billing and service mercy. If you dislike your cable, as I do mine, you can cut it off but the next cable company, serving the next city, may not hook you up to their service.
You also have no say in the programming and mine is crappy. Also, you cable company may carefully screw you by breaking up the programs into packages, with the cheapest giving you just enough premium stations to keep from suiciding. If you want survivable TV, you buy the first and second packages, which gives you a few additional packages at greater cost, repeats a lot of the programs on various channels and just gets you angary enough to beat up the cable guy. Now, if you want good TV, you order the Premium packages where you pay even more for things like HBO, but, after a time, you find you just want to shot holes in the cable guys truck because now you have a major bill and at least 15 to 20 channels you’re not going to watch. All carefully designed to make you pay more money. With digital coming in, new, premium channels are added, but only on digital and programming gets worse on regular cable. (Just how many times can they replay the Lucy show before people run screaming from their houses? How many times can HBO 1 run shows we saw two years ago, lame sex movies and other garbage and still have the right to charge us?) But, there is a plan here. Desperate, you switch to digital to get better TV and pay about $30 more a month … for the first level. If you want like 2 or 3 HBO’s, 2 STARZ and several other premium channels that have good shows, you buy level two, which jacks your bill up another $20.
See how it works? A mini-monopoly within a non-molopoly State, that obeys the anti-monopoly laws.
Radio stations and newspapers, being the prime areas of freedom of speech, were controlled by Hurst and others like him and they printed, played or mentioned only what they wanted. The monopoly laws ended that. No one person could own more than 10 radio stations or 10 newspapers.
Until several years ago. Now the limit is something like 20 or 30 each. Radio stations are being bought up like cheap beer on dollar night at a bar. One I listen to has been bought and sold 4 times in the past 8 years. The new power base has begun to decide that music radio is dying and are starting to change radio formats to mainly talk.
You now get to listen only to what the owning corporation decides that you can.
The record industry makes you pay $15.00 for a CD that costs them less than $2.00 to make. They pay the artist maybe $1.00 out of that $15. They require radio stations to pay them a flat fee to pay their CDs, they stopped Napster from freely giving away songs, songs used in movies have to have fees paid to the recording company, which is why so many B movies come up with sucky songs that maybe the producers cousin wrote. If you mention the name of a song or the lyrics of one in a book or any published for sale material, you have to pay a fee.
The record companies are cleaning up. Plus, they decide what music they are going to push to radio stations. If they get irritated at a good artist, then his songs do not get air time. (Notice the lack of many old, great country singers on the radio? The recording companies have decided that they’re too old to push their records and the radio stations are pushing new country rock even though these old guys (and I detest country music) are still a commercial item).
No monopoly here though, because there are something like 4 surviving recording companies. The previous 20 or so having been wiped out and the survivors have agreed on selling prices and fees to charge everyone.
Understand now?
Just remember, the fewer the service corporations, the more they will charge the public. There only needs to be two in order to follow monopoly laws, and it is illegal for them to fix prices, but they do it a whole lot.
IANAL, but I thought as a tenant of an apt. building, the landlord decides who provides services to his/her building. I don’t think that I could say, change utility companies, because my landlord uses Pasadena Water n’ Power…
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I am not sure what universe you live in, but it is apparently not the same one I have been inhabiting the past thirty years. AT&T did not whine about Ma Bell because AT&T was part of Ma Bell. Service sucked. The technology sucked. Long distance calls were very expensive. You didn’t even own the phone in your house, you rented it from the phone company. If it broke, you couldn’t just go out and buy a replacement, you had to wait for the phone company to send over a repairman.
MCI was the company that was bitching and moaning, but the public at large was bitching and moaning, too. Remember Lily Tomlin’s phone operator routine? It got a lot of laughs. “We don’t care. We don’t have to care. We’re the phone company.”
Congress didn’t break up Bell Telephone. A judge did. It was broken up into
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[li]AT&T[/li][li]Bell Labs, later renamed Lucent Technologies[/li][li]OpalCat[/li][li]All those little “Baby Bells”: Southern Bell, Bell Edison, Pacific Bell, etc.[/li][/list=1]
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This, I believe, is the pro-Microsoft argument.
This, I believe, is the anti-Microsoft argument.
A reasonable condensation, although the “permits” are generally called “franchises.”
NOW we come to the inevitable bitter, misguided part.
The “people” who came up with this idea are the power companies themselves, and they long ago figured out how to integrate their separate facilities into what they like to call the “power grid” or just “the grid.” It is not, and has never been, called ‘deregulation.’ The term ‘deregulation’ is never used to mean what one might think it to mean. Rather, it is a term to define a political scheme to buy or steal votes and/or money. In California’s case, the word used should have been ‘re-regulation,’ meaning simply that the regulations were being rewritten to favor someone – anyone but the power companies who provide the product – for the purpose of garnering votes.
In fact, under the right circumstances, this is perfectly feasible.
Agreed on the general points. Some goods and services are so universally needed and used, and require such massive capital investment and maintenance to produce, that monopolies on them are actually good. Such monopolies certainly exist and, far from being illegal, are very much encouraged by government and enjoyed by the people.
CommonMan82, your post is so full if misinformation that I do not know where to begin. You need to get better information.
>> Firstly, yes, monopolies are illegal
Nope. Can you tell me what law says monopolies are illegal? I know the Sherman Act (if I recall the name correctly) prohibits certain practices which go against competition but I do not believe it says anything about monopolies being illegal. I’d like to see a cite of a law which does what you say.
Not only that, certain monopolies (as should be clear at this point of the thread) are mandated by law. Case in point (which has been discussed in this context in past threads) the USPS.
I will not bother with the rest of your post.