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Comment by DiscourseFan | Hacker News Reader

I guess they are, but that isn't material to the discussion, since they are selling goods not services, thus they don't extract "rents," unless anything that someone buys for some purpose is a "rent"; in that case, the super market is charging me "rents" to purchase their food so I can have it in my fridge.

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I think your argument is just a bunch of pedantry but OK: Western Electric produced commodities for the Bell system. So did a lot of other companies, selling into a market that was functionally a monopsony.

Yet the fact that this was necessary is tangential, the Bell system didn't exist to sell switches or phones. The phone network monopoly was AT&T's fief, the rent was the phone bill everyone had to pay!

If you aren't AMD, nVidia, Google, or Apple how much luck do you think you'll have putting in an order to TSMC for 2nm? Or Samsung? Or Micron? Or Hynix?

Why is every service considered a “rent”? These services basically depend on commodity production—bell may have had a monopoly on phone service but not on the phones themselves. Or the copper used to manufacture their cables, or the housing which their employees slept in or the food they consumed. Service monopoly =! Neofeudalism, just because it is a more recent phenomenon does not mean its unique, JP Morgan had a rail monopoly, nobody considered his business “Neofeudalism.”

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