Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Yup. I'd love to see some sort of automatic regulation for situations of market failure. E.g., If the 2 largest players in a market have more than an 80% market share, the presumption should be regulation.

In SF, I have multiple ISP options. I get gigabit fiber for $40/month and no nonsense. But my girlfriend lives in an area with Comcast only, where the price is much higher, the service is much worse, and they had loaded her bill down with absurd equipment rental charges.

When sufficient competition doesn't exist, we shouldn't just abandon people to predatory companies.

View on HN

In general, I agree, though I think I'd also include some consideration of size or barriers to entry. As an example, photomultiplier tubes are used to detect very small amounts of light, down to a few photons. They are primarily produced by Hamamatsu, which has about 90% market share for PMTs. And they are ridiculously reliable, used in detectors that last for decades. Even without competition in PMTs, they make good products. It's a very small market, and doesn't have room for much competition, so I don't think that market share alone can be the sole determinant.

That said, if the quality were to drop, if they were to engage in anticompetitive behavior, if they were to provide tools to subvert an election, if they were to repeatedly buy out competitors, or any combination of the above, I would drop them in a heartbeat.

In that case, I think there's not a lot a regulator has to do. But I think it's still appropriate to have a regulator tracking the space, so that they can quickly respond to the sorts of declines you discuss.

>I'd love to see some sort of automatic regulation for situations of market failure.

Why do you assume "market failure", and not "regulatory capture"?

> the presumption should be regulation

Can we first get rid of the extant anti-competitive regulations that create and maintain monopolies?

> But my girlfriend lives in an area with Comcast only

Have you looked into what's stopping a would-be competing ISP?

> the presumption should be regulation.

No.

The presumption should be making it easy to enable competition, which the current rules don't do. Make it easy for Google to come in and lay fiber on their own dime.

Am I the only one that would be apprehensive about Big-G's fiber for privacy reasons?

No, lol. I don't think I'd want it either. But it's a moot point, currently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com