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randallsquared comments on Open Thread: May 2009 - Less Wrong
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How does that square with the fact that in places without government-granted monopolies, there are often more than one provider? My apartment building has two separate cable companies, in addition to Verizon fiber. Is there a general argument for how rental houses often end up with two or more separate cable boxes from more than one provider in areas without government suppression of competition, while still holding that it can't happen in the general case?
Installing wires requires digging up roads, using utility poles and leaving utility boxes on other peoples' property. You need permission from local government to do that, period. In some places, the local governments only give one company permission to do that. That's a government granted monopoly. In other places, they give permission to more than one company, so that they can compete with each other. That's a government granted oligarchy. But whether there's one pre-existing cable company or five, if you want to start a new cable company, you need government permission, and you probably won't get it. It's nothing like a free market.
And it's worth noting that a gentlemen's agreement to not compete too hard is profitable for all parties in a heavily restricted market. Ergo, the government-granted oligopoly is only superior to the monopoly insofar as you expect business executives to be irrational enough to not cooperate in the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma.
You mean oligopoly
Yep, it's the bankers that are a government granted oligarchy.
There are other alternatives as well. There's a company here that provides high speed broadband to businesses via a network of roof mounted microwave transmitters. Businesses use them because they offer better value than paying a local cable company to hook a building up. My parents in rural England had a number of options for broadband despite no cable companies operating in the area, including DSL and a wireless relay from a satellite uplink.