Senado dos EUA vota a favor de retomar neutralidade da rede no país

Catioro escreveu:

Nesses lugares têm 1 ou 2 empresas por que o Estado proporciona esses monopólios via intervenção, acredito.

What do you mean by 'capitalist theories'? If by that you mean economic theory, then not quite.

The hypothetical you detail would happen if it were a market with perfect information, perfect competition, and no barriers to entry. These types of assumptions are simple to model, but usually not super accurate; for instance, perfect information assumes that you can instantaneously and without any cost in time or money understand the entirety of any fine-print contract you're supposed to sign as part of a market transaction, which in reality almost nobody reads all the way through, let alone understands.

If you really want to get into it, it requires a long dive into economics. There are two principle ways in which the hypothetical scenario you mentioned fails: 1) it doesn't account for market failures, and 2) it doesn't account for governmental action.

1) A market can inherently be a natural monopoly. This is most commonly because there are large ***** costs required in order to start producing in the market (in the case of Internet service, you need to run wires to every home, which costs a lot to do initially) and low marginal costs (once everything's set up, it doesn't cost much to keep everything going.)

Imagine if you will multiple companies attempting to provide internet service to a town where there is no prior infrastructure. Each of them has to dig a separate series of tunnels and bury separate networks of wires to connect all of the houses together. We have already excluded any smaller companies because it will simply cost too much money for any company who doesn't already have a lot of money laying around to invest in this project. But you can also see that this is clearly nonsensical; no company wants to go to the expense of building this entire network if there's a significant chance a house might not even use their service. Now imagine that the local telephone company decides it wants to get in on this internet business. They have a significant advantage over all potential competitors in that they already have a pre-existing network of wires connecting all the houses, so for them this requires only minor changes to allow for internet service.

Internet service also has network effects; the more people you have on your network, the easier it is to add 1 more person and the more benefit that additional person will see. This means that the equilibrium of the market will be towards fewer companies, especially if one company already had a pre-existing network.

2) Simplistic, entry-level economic analysis ignores the power of the government to intervene in markets, which can entirely change the market structure. For instance, imagine those multiple companies who all have to dig a series of tunnels. That will require going under public roads and on private property, which will require quite a lot of paperwork and permits. A local government official might decide that it doesn't make sense for 5 separate companies to all have separate networks and dig up the whole town, and instead decree that only 1 or 2 companies have permission to set up their networks. This would then be a government-granted monopoly, becoming the only legally allowed company providing internet service in that area.

Now, why would the government do this? A couple reasons. One, they might just be entirely corrupt and their friend Bob runs the one legal internet company. Two, and more rationally, markets with network effects and large extensive infrastructure that needs to be built is obviously cheaper for the town to make if they only do it once. So the governmental official grants this one company a legal monopoly, but in turn regulates them very tightly, guaranteeing a consistent profit for the company but also making sure they provide adequate service with affordable prices. This market style is common with utilities such as water, electricity, and trash collection (all of which feature similar market characteristics as internet service), hence there has been a debate over whether internet qualifies as a utility.

The problem with internet service providers is that they have in many places acted as a utility in terms of monopoly pricing with shit quality, but not acted as a utility in terms of being heavily regulated by the government. This is partially due to the fact that internet service is a relatively new market, which takes time for the law to catch up with, and partially due to intense lobbying by companies already in the market trying to keep themselves from getting regulated.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/4vnshc/why_does_there_seem_to_be_no_competition_to_the/