This seems to be strong evidence that government is better at keeping trade free than an 'unregulated free market'?
Through franchise fees, fighting public right of way sharing, and other forms of lobbying these large corporations have used law and regulation to their favor. This is not a position libertarians support and it is not a market anyone would point at and call "unregulated" in any sense of the term.
Yes. Most regulation benefits some corporations, because there are very few regulatory issues where there aren't corporations on all sides of the issue.
> (regulation tends to mean "regulation against corporations")
No, it doesn't. There is certainly a particular faction that sees regulation as inherently "anti-business", and a popular association of business = corporation, so I can see how that idea would come about, but its not at all what regulation means.
So your choice is: big business squelching competition directly or big business squelching competition through lobbying.
The problem still goes back to unchecked unregulated big businesses forcing themselves on the country with their market share and giant wealth.
X isn't perfect, so Y must be better? That makes no sense.
I'm pro-free market because I go into the grocery store and see an entire row of bread. In communism, there is an entire row of people waiting for bread. Free market == abundance, government == rationing.
I use communism as the example because it is the opposite of free-market and highlights the historical (not ideological) differences between the two systems. Free markets have a triage effect. When supplies are limited, prices go up, and if you really need something you can still get it (but you'll pay more).
The opposite of that system is one of price fixing and rationing. You may need something more than me, but the price is fixed at X, so there needs to be a lottery to decide who gets the limited supply. If I win, I get to watch fail videos on youtube all day. If you win, you get to run your online business that day.
ISPs are struggling to keep up with demand. They've been trying to price their services in a way to triage demand while they build more capacity (which is mostly held up by local governments). Now the FCC will step in and make sure that I can watch my youtube videos all day and make it illegal for the ISP to favor your clearly more important traffic.
Every thing in the supermarket is created by a small amount of companies. The rest is all marketing.
Unregulated free market doesn't stay free for long because competition is rapidly consolidated, squashed, or absorbed by larger fish into mega monopolies.
A free market is just as crazy as communism as both have the end result of a small group of people controlling the market.
You have plenty of choices, at least 5 distinct parent companies that make different brands, smaller and still independent brands, a small local bakery, buy the ingredients and make it yourself, or start a bread business and sell out to Kraft and buy yourself a private island.
When everyone is waiting in line for bread it's because they have no choice.
Is it possible that you're too spoiled to see how spoiled you are? Are you one of those 99%'ers that protested against big companies in the rain wearing your North Face jacket, Merrell boots, and tweeted about how much big companies suck from your iphone?
I think libertarians are not naive; they're old boys accustomed to dealing with other old boys in that network. So they see free market working pretty well in that context, and want to extend it.
It's not far fetched to make parallels from this that if the 'privatized' major corporations aren't above squashing competitors through unfair trade practices and lobbying for biased regulations in the telecom industries....then they would do it in other industries.
And this kills the market.