The only place monopolies tend to emerge is heavily regulated areas that allow for regulatory capture (laying fiber is a great example of this).
The only place monopolies tend to emerge is heavily regulated areas that allow for regulatory capture (laying fiber is a great example of this).
No, actually laying fiber is a great example of the problem with a free market.
It's not regulations that make it hard to put down fiber, it's property rights. Without some sort of regulation or government action (such as eminent domain) it's impossible to build out modern infrastructure. There will always be some person with property right in the way of a cable line. You can beg and plead with them to let you bury a line (including pointing out that it's very temporary disruption of soil) and they can still just say no.
It isn't unusual for a phone company that's looking at a difficult land owner to say "ok, screw it, we'll just have to take a 90 mile detour because the guy that owns that 500 yard strip won't let us bury here". Imagine how much harder that is if the land owner is related to or owns stock in a competitor company.
We have been able to lay as much fiber as we have in the US because there's a bunch of regulations around right of way that ultimately grants burying rights near public roads to utilities companies like ISPs. Without those, it'd be almost impossible.
Once you get down to the level of property rights, the only alternative left is total might-makes-right anarchy.
Property rights are some of the earliest and most basic things protected by governments—indeed, to a large extent they precede governments, being protected with force by the people who wish to assert them.
Wipe out all regulations, all laws, all property rights, and try to run fiber across someone's property without their permission, and they're likely to come out with a shotgun and start shooting everyone digging. Follow the steps logically from that point, and you'll fairly quickly start reinventing governments and regulations.
That means if you are a new comer, you have to employ significant military strength to guard and defend your line going in. Otherwise, existing powers will simply stomp it out as soon as they get a whiff that someone is trying to compete with them. That, or they'll simply take your line by force.
That is probably the most difficult form of entry because it requires someone to be independently very wealthy before they could dream of putting in new infrastructure and it requires them to enforce their own property rights since there's no government doing that.
Are you an anarco-communist by chance? That's about the only group I'm aware of that would advocate for the complete elimination of property rights, but they also usually don't advocate for a "free market".
To quote myself: "the Western-style free market is very keen on creating and maintaining monopolies"
Guess who's the highly influential investor, with strong connection to the WH who said the following:
"Competition is for losers".
This sums up pretty well what the free market is keen on.
Okay, totally meaningless, it didn’t prove anything.