How SBC (AT&T) Pillaged South Africa's Economy

Kifoth writes "For 8 years, SBC and Telekom Malaysia controlled South Africa's only telecommunications company, Telkom. Telkom had a government granted monopoly in order for it to connect the large parts of South Africa that had been neglected under apartheid. Instead of helping, SBC abused their position and raised Telkom's prices to be among the highest in the world. The billions they made here ultimately went to fund their AT&T merger. From the article: 'SBC, described as "congenitally litigious", is said to have played a major role in the failure of South Africa's telecoms policy to develop a competitive telephone service. Under SBC's control Telkom not only failed to meet its roll-out obligations but behaved "as a tax on industry and a drag on economic growth."'"

Comments

Re:How South Africa's Government was Utterly Stupi

[sethawoolley]

but the ultimate source of the problem was corporate greed that lead to the collusion of government and a corporation, Oh, don't be stupid.

Corporate greed has always existed in one form or another since the dawn of the human race. Greed is human nature. The utter utter stupidity is not to take it into account, and that's where free markets come in.

You pit one greedy bastard against a dozen other greedy bastards. Everyone benefits from the hard work of the group of greedy bastards.

The fault lies with the either utterly stupidity or corrupt politicians who granted the monopoly. It has nothing to do with libertarian ideology and everything to do with understanding human beings. Oh don't be naive.

Your general premise is "People will do bad things, thus they aren't at fault for their badness if they are allowed to do it."

So if people are part of the government, and they allowed this bad thing, they aren't at fault for their badness too, since the people allowed them to?

So, it's back to the people who didn't intervene against these politicians who are at fault -- but they did a bad thing by doing that, and who allowed them to be passive?

You see where this is going?

I think I've got the more coherent point that both the government and the corporation were complicit and both were wrong.

But alas, you're a libertarian ideological fundamentalist, so if the corporation did something bad, they didn't do anything "actually" bad.

Whatever.