Where's the Antritrust Probe of Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and all of those other shit-eating ISPs? At least Google gives me some fantastic services at little cost to me.
The problem with Google, as far as the US Government is concerned, is that it is not a government regulated monopoly. They fear anything with such vast scope and influence / power, that they don't have a certain level of direct control over.
The purpose of pursuing Google on anti-trust is to bring them under supervision of the US Government. The same reason the Feds were interested in Microsoft. It surprisingly takes very little to cause anti-trust problems for a major company, as little as one powerful senator dedicated to the issue. Google will be brought under a consent decree in the next few years most likely, and by the time the Feds get around to doing that, the market will have likely already made Google's dominance in search a lot less important.
Can you elaborate on how that might happen, operationally?
I think Peter Thiel alluded to this in an interview recently. From what I recollect, he suggested that by the time Feds act, the monopoly has already been disrupted elsewhere.
45 minute mark of this interview http://thisweekinstartups.com/peter-thiel-launch-festival/
Google will continue to make money from ads delivered into this virtual space and it will also have more leverage to regulate 3rd party apps, giving it access to the space within the apps as well. Oh, and also all these virtual spaces will have private and public modes.
The biggest problem really is screen area. The only reason Google can't exploit Android to its fullest potential is that phone screens just aren't large enough to dedicate a sufficient screen area to advertisement (it's a funny paradox: the phone as a real-life implement is limited to a form factor that precludes advertising space, which by its nature is always limited to 'sub-prime real-estate'). Perhaps OLED will be the solution to this, though I am more partial to drone-phones that hover beside their owners and use lasers to project the "screen" onto special eye contacts.
Anyway, with that digression out of the way, if you want to understand the relationship between government regulators and telecommunications companies, I highly recommend Tim Wu’s book The Master Switch. Government regulation of telecommunications industries has often been contingent, contradictory, and somewhat chaotic (in the sense that small nudges lead to dramatic unpredictable changes).
Their cozy relationships with the big banks could've fooled me.
In that case, new companies have to lay new cables and provision new data centers and hire new people, whereas TWC only has to ship out a cable modem and allow access to pre-existing capacity.
One way around this would be to force TWC and Comcast and so on to divest themselves of the physical infrastructure up to their in-plant demarcation points, spin off new natural monopolies to only own the cables, and force those new companies to lease to all comers at the same low rate, with a managed X% profit spelled out in regulations. That way, an upstart would only have to provision new data centers and hire new people; that's still more than Comcast has to do, but it's a lot less than the current state of affairs.
This is related to Net Neutrality, in that the neutrality rules are more urgently needed as long as ISPs have unshakeable monopolies on a regional basis, but even if competition were more robust it would still make sense to ensure no ISP could become that predatory.
Three providers would be unthinkable for a true natural monopoly, like roads or water.
You're lucky. I only have Cable and (crappy) DSL. My cable is good, but the DSL is so awful that if my cable provider decided to triple their rates I would have no choice but to acquiesce and pay up. I think that's the very definition of a natural monopoly.
A very large number of Americans have no, or only one high speed internet provider - and that was by the 2010 standard of "high speed": http://broadbandnow.com/report/2013-underserved/
( Relevant YC discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9044719 )
Where I live there is either cable (which exists because of cable TV) and terrible DSL (which exists because of phone lines). There has never been any attempt to wire the area only to provide internet service. And as far as I know, there is only one set of wires for cable TV. So, it sure appears to be a natural monopoly to me.
Any opinions on that?