gulation to protect its monopoly power. I answered in a private message: Microsoft.
Kinda obvious if you think about it for, oh, say, 12 microseconds. The government actually had to step in to hinder them, as I recall,
On 4/25/2014 8:23 AM, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote: though I believe it was pointless. Relatively speaking, Microsoft had a short run monopoly if you want to call it that. They definitely had the market share. With the introduction of the smartphone and the tablet, people have required more versatile applications which tend to work across multiple devices. In this regard, I believe Apple won. Internet growth and consumer education have also altered market share. The money filtering into open source has fueled a lot of growth in software development and allowed a lot more flexibility. The change to OSX and x86 on Apple's part along with google and redhat's efforts have altered the playing field permanently.
Which were "Anyone afraid what will happen when companies which have monopolies can charge content providers or guarantee packet loss?" and "How is this good for the consumer?" and "How is this good for the market?"
My answer was an attempt to say that if you don't have any government entities allowing and protecting (two pretty much interchangeable terms, I prefer the latter) monopolies the answer to the first question is "Huh? What?" and to the second and third "Best service for the best price is pretty good for everybody. Except the losers that can't rip you off without the FCC protection." While it is probably true that the gov't had a hand in the fact I have exactly one BB provider at my home, I am not even closed to convinced that a purely open market would not have resulted in the same problem. But thanx for pointing out an answer I probably missed.
In Oklahoma, I've watched WISPs take money from the various grants for under-served areas. They love to move into small cities and those cities are happy to have them. Their plan is well thought out. They know exactly how fast the telco will move to increase speeds and drop the requirement that you must also pay for a phone line (which the telco was just using to pull in extra money on the backside until the FCC finally changes that funding). The prices suddenly drop in the town. It's not the best service for either party, but it is at least more affordable. The one that pisses me off is when ILECs use grant money strictly to try and wipe out their competition. It creates a very bad environment, where one company must use grants for the same area as another company just to stay competitive. I don't mind all these funds and all, but there needs to be much more oversight on how the funding is used. "underserved" is too broad, and the grants get used in anti-competitive practices against companies that don't pull money from the government. In addition, I too often see companies that have used grants not lower their prices, provide more jobs, or increase their bandwidth offerings. I hear corporate jet fuel is costly, though. We still have huge areas of land that have little or no affordable broadband capability. These are areas that it isn't profitable to buy the equipment to serve and where grant money would do the most good to allow sustainable growth. What I've been pondering is the creation of non-profit ISPs, where the purpose is to actually serve the people who won't make you millions at cost. Jack