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I suspect that if there are multiple river shipping companies but one monopoly lock operator, all of the economic surplus in the river transport industry will be captured by that monopoly operator.

Perhaps the solution is for the river shipping industry to form a co-op to build, own and operate the necessary infrastructure.

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Good idea! The more people we get to buy into the cooperative the better it will be! If we get everybody to participate we can just call it "government".

People would complain less if the costs involved were clearly spelled out, as well as who was paying the costs.

Except that government is universal, whereas a river cooperative would only affect the parties directly involved. Thus you could scale things up without getting to government-scale.

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