> Even if they reject what you propose you're still able to try to convince others that your idea is better and, assuming that you have a democracy, you can have the rules changed.
If you have a good idea in a competitive market, your incentive to advocate for it is that if it succeeds you get market share. If a company has a billion dollars in costs and you can reduce them by 10%, that's worth a hundred million dollars, which is a huge incentive to do it when you get to put the hundred million dollars in your pocket, or capture a large fraction of a market whose net profit has a similar number of zeroes in it.
If you have the same idea but the incumbent monopolist doesn't listen to you, how many hours can you justify advocating for it? Your share of the efficiency as a customer is e.g. $50/year.
> I struggle to imagine a scenario where there's no possible way to determine if an error was made or if a change might be an improvement without just doing it anyway. If it isn't plainly obvious that your idea would be better and there are also no facts, research, examples, models, etc. that give support to your idea you should expect to have trouble convincing others of how great it is.
Models can't give you empirical evidence.
Suppose the monopolist has been doing something a particular way for 100 years. The equipment they use is expensive and lasts 30 years, as is the equipment you want to use instead. Their argument is that they want all their equipment to be uniform and don't want to be stuck with something experimental for the entire service lifetime, so they don't even want to invest in a small trial because if the benefits aren't large they'd either have to replace the trial equipment early or support two types of equipment for three decades. Your argument, which they reject, is that it's worth risking a moderate amount of capital to do a trial with 5% of the installed base.
If there is no monopoly then you risk your own time or money to do the small trial and reap the benefits if it works out. But with a monopolist who says no to the attempt, you can't show that your solution is better because they've declared that the cost of finding out isn't something they're willing to pay, and the option to take the risk onto yourself is taken away.
> It's why international standards and internet protocols exist and are followed. It promotes interoperability. It'd be a lot easier to write an app to help people keep tabs on their power usage and charges if there was just one company putting out bills and an API.
Except that those sort of things don't have anything enforcing the monopoly, and in many cases don't even have one. For example, gzip and lzma both have published formats but they essentially compete with each other, and that's good, because lzma has better compression ratios but gzip is faster and uses less memory. And the existence of either one doesn't prevent the introduction of zstd, which manages to get compression ratios competitive with lzma while still being pretty fast.
And having multiple algorithms doesn't impede interoperability because nobody is forced to use any particular one. A server can use zstd with newer clients that support it and gzip with older ones that don't. If you want to transfer a file you can use https, ftps or sftp. There is a published standard for the telnet protocol and nobody is prevented from replacing it with ssh.
> Even with a single company providing a service they can still make good use of diversification to limit their risks. Companies with tons of competitors often take those kinds of precautions to avoid single points of failure within their operations. The last ISP I worked for had over 15 types of modems in the field from a variety of manufacturers.
At which point you're abandoning the "benefits" of uniformity and scale and then why forego the benefits of a competitive market?
> When power companies are doing what's expected of them nobody has a preference for the electricity that Company A provides over what Company B delivers.
They may have no preference for who generates the electricity because electricity is a fungible commodity, but they certainly do have a preference for a company that can supply it more efficiently at a lower price, and many customers will also have preferences on things like green energy, redundancy/reliability vs. cost, the trade off between having a consistent bill vs. paying live rates that might be lower on average but higher in specific months, etc.
About the only time you have a product where every customer wants the same thing is when you have a product where there is only one customer, e.g. the US military. And those tend to be the things where having a single supplier is extremely bad, since you don't want the single point of failure.