Comments: Yahoo!BB market penetration

No, because even "unregulated" businesses are still constrained by normal tort, contract and competition law. Unfortunately, they seem to be able to bypass these as long as they are regulated.

So a monopoly provider that insists you buy Product B with Product A (for which they have a monopoly) would fall foul of competition law. (Am I an optimist or what!)

If they are a duopoly with market power and supernormal profit, then the real issue is the protection of new entrants from predatory pricing.

Once you separate application from service, and have the open IP standard for interconnect, there is no longer anything special about telecom -- no winner-takes-all network effect. So deregulate away, and beef up the government competition lawyers.

Posted by Martin Geddes at December 10, 2004 03:58 PM