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Cable Companies Free To Grow, Grow, Grow
Dasheiff writes: "A federal appeals court [NYTimes, free reg. req. [?] ] struck down a set of regulations today that had prevented the nation's largest cable companies from growing beyond serving more than 30 percent of the cable and satellite market's subscribers and providing more than 40 percent of its channels with programming from its affiliated companies. In other words AT&T and AOL Time Warner can now continue to expand their monopoly. However it's not clear if this is a bad thing, if shows continue to be poor people will not watch them. Companies need to compete with the viewer more than the other companies." So, were those limits actually doing customers good or not? And will this make high-speed access (even if AOL-TW dominated) available in many places it's not right now?
Dude, are you new to Slashdot or something? 'Monopoly' has nothing to do with marketshare. It is fair game to use on any company which is really trendy to hate (i.e. any company which is actually successful). For example, everybody knows that all five (!) major record companies are monopolies, since they put only one good song per album. Similarly, Intel is a monopoly, since they make better products than Via, Transmeta, and AMD. Lastly, the cable companies are all monopolies, since they deliver high bandwidth data at affordable prices. Got it now?
The only solution to this is to have the government impose restrictions. Like the article submitter said, the government should choose what cable companies you should be allowed and not allowed to subscribe to, by putting caps on the marketshare of each company. The government always knows what's best for us. We're not smart enough to make decisions for ourselves, and the only solution is a massive, overreaching government beauracracy to control every aspect of our spending decisions (which, as we all know, are much more friendly and efficient than all of those evil, big, bad corporations).
Depending on which dictionary you go to, monopoly is either held exclusively by one company, or by a group. (Dictionary.com uses the word "group", while Merriam-Webster just refers to a single company.) The definition of "group" is what's important here. There are many instances in business history where competitors in one field got together to agree not to compete in certain ways -- most notably by price-fixing.
Free-market economic theory would indicate that CEOs would never do this, that they would decide to compete in any way possible to eke out more market share. Yet this does happen. We have documented cases of price-fixing across all sorts of industries: legal research, oil firms, even vitamin manufacturers. There are plenty of theories as to why it happens, though my personal favorite is psychological. I think that CEOs, when they're placed in charge of vast corporations they cannot entirely control or understand, become extremely risk-averse. This is why large corporations rarely innovate; it's also why a CEO might enter into a price-fixing agreement. It's just one less thing to worry about. At least for the CEO; everybody else usually suffers, in higher prices and poorer quality.
Do domain names matter?
You must be kidding. @home has me capped with an upload speed of about 16 Kiloytes per second. During the evening a 56K modem might be faster for DOWNLOADS.
The prospect of large cable companies is disheartening. Their customer service sucks because they do not have anything that approaches competition. They think they are entitled to my business and they act like it.
As soon as I can I am dropping Cable and looking at satellite access for my tv and as soon as DSL makes it here I am making the switch.
I'm still working on a clever footer.