Still, good news whatever the reason. Competition is desperately needed here, even if it’s only going to be between three or four major options.
Republicans simply have a different utility function. They consider deregulation, and ease of running a business more important than enforcing fairness via legislation.
They believe the market will do a better job than they can do. Democrats don't trust the market to do that, and feel they can do a better job.
In the US we would never tolerate such conditions and it would be legally impossible on a large number of levels, the least of which not also being our minimum wage. While I think this is probably the right way to go, it also means that our taking the higher moral ground there means that we're severely hurting domestic producers by making it literally impossible for them to compete with the prices that they can produce things for. By not relying entirely on market forces we've crippled our ability to compete.
In a world where politics, on both the right and left, was not dictated by business interests there would be bipartisan support to let's say "adjust" our relations with China on this front. It's reminiscent of the times past when countries would speak out against slavery and then buy the dirt cheap American cotton and tobacco by the ton. We believe workers have the right to certain reasonable working conditions and in the process of doing so end up massively cutting employment in our nation and then shipping trillions of dollars to nations with no such concerns. It's hardly logical regardless of your political leaning.
How do you know which it is?
But it's irrelevant, for the electorate in question, Democrats are most definitely not center.
I was using an absolute scale, and yes, frankly the democrats are a bit right of center.
I mean if you declare the electorate the spectrum, then nothing means anything, because its all a completely meaningless fluid definition which has no basis in actual reality.
What republicans are worried about is attempts to undo the 1996 reforms. There are people who think that rate regulation, municipal utility boards deciding where infrastructure should be built, etc., are actually good ideas. Probably not a majority of people even in the democrat camp, but there are enough people who don't remember why the 1996 act was a good idea that it makes republicans nervous.
But one big problem with "attempts to undo the 1996 reforms" is that Europe kept (and expanded) linesharing and unbundled network element rules; the United States threw out most mandatory UNE rules and never expanded them to include companies operating networks over coax or new-build fiber optic networks.
So now we have this farce where, in some areas, people served by DSL have the choice of several (slow) ISPs because the copper is still technically, kinda unbundled. But if you can't get DSL or can't get a sufficiently fast speed, your sole choice is likely your monopoly cable provider.
U.S. copper unbundling rules are weaker than the U.S., but copper is also largely irrelevant in the U.S., because most broadband is over cable or fiber. Unbundling matters more in Europe, but primarily because DSL is much more common in Europe.
As it so happens, crowded urban centers, where a single cell tower or fiber-optic network can serve thousands of paying customers, benefit a great deal from deregulation. Sparsely populated rural areas, however, where "last mile" really means "last 30 miles", get screwed over by deregulation since companies have minimal incentive to expand if it only means 10 new paying members.
I'm not saying either extreme is perfect -- indeed, deregulation likely helps more than it hurts given increasing population density in U.S. cities -- but it seems to me that there are advantages to both sides of the equation.
Seems Europeans consumers have reaped massive benefits since then:
At least where I live we now have fast Internet access, calls and sms cost nothing (theoretically speaking we get n free minutes and sms, but I never used more in the last few years) and data is cheap.
Not saying this is all because of the deregulation but I think it helped.
There's a reason control usually flip-flops each election, it's the electorate trying to accomplish this. See here: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/sep...
> Like have the house and the senate controlled by different parties, or the president and the legislature different parties, etc, etc.
This two party system makes it too easy for one party to control all 3 branches (like now..). Having a true multiparty system (>2, preferably more) forces compromise, because you wouldn't have a government without it.
The result is that a sufficiently large social network is, effectively, a natural monopoly. Which is exactly why no-one has managed to dethrone Facebook yet, not even by throwing lots of money at a better alternative (like G+).
In particular, check out Facebook v. Power Ventures, where an entrepreneur was left owing $3M in damages to Facebook for allowing users to extract only their own information.
Underpinning all digital "monopolies" is copyright law, which is eminently changeable. It really pets my peeves when people suggest things like streaming services are natural monopolies as if there is nothing that can be done about it.
Copyright was invented because since the printing press, intellectual goods are so easy to copy that it'd be impossible to sell them at scale without state-enforced supply ceilings (aka copyright).
Doesn't sound like a "natural monopoly" to me. It's wholly artificial and we could change it if we wanted.