The logic there is astounding. The government broke up AT&T into a bunch of little companies. These companies then merged their way back into a handful of large corporations and are still trying to merge even more. Did the government force them to join up together? Of course not. The government is actively discouraging a lot of these mergers, i.e. the government is forcing there to be a more competitive marketplace.
The government broke up AT&T into a bunch of little companies
After establishing it as a federal monopoly in 1934. (And in TFA, we're talking British Telecom.)
Similarly, there are a lot of municipal agreements in the US where one company gets the exclusive right to handle local phone or cable service within a city or region. More companies or smaller companies doesn't mean any benefit for consumers when they still just end up choosing between "the phone company" and "the cable company" as designated by law.
> After establishing it as a federal monopoly in 1934. (And in TFA, we're talking even worse entities.)
In order to regulate it (putting it under jurisdiction of the FCC) as Bell was already a natural monopoly by this point, even after the Kingsbury Commitment.
At the top of this thread, ojbyrne says we need to have government regulation in order to create competition.
Here you say that we needed regulation to make AT&T a de jure national monopoly so that we could further regulate AT&T.
So, regulation grants monopolies, then regulates those monopolies, then also regulates more competition into the monopoly market it had previously granted? This is good governance?
Regulation did not create AT&T's monopoly. AT&T did that, the government later sanctioned it in order to try and better regulate the monopolistic company (it failed).
Likewise, in many European countries, telecoms were originally national monopolies. Both in Europe and in the United States those national monopolies were either broken up or subjected to more competition.
VMG is quite correct to point out that telecoms gained monopoly status due to government action.
There are two differences (though I don't think they're very important):
* In Europe, it was generally an artificial monopoly through a state company, Ma Bell was a natural monopoly sanctioned by the federal government.
* Where Ma Bell was broken up following an antitrust case, most european monopolies were simply privatized along with new regulations (or deregulations depending on the market) forcing them to open up their market (instead of turtling)
That doesn't really explain the difference though. The one Dutch telephone company used to be state owned. Now we have multiple competing telephone/tv/internet companies.
