> The phone company was of course one of these, though that was due to
> traditional gov't franchise rather than otherwise. Local carriers
> continued to be this until recently. Cable.
But these are physical plant monopolies, granted by government
franchise, and/or powered by traditional increasing-returns-
to-scale. They're nothing like this newfangled Microsoft
monopoly you find objectionable.
And since when did simply "hard to compete against" become
"coercive"? We free marketeers should be very careful about
calling anything short of violence or fraud "coercion".
> Other examples? I'm just getting warmed up on this, so I'll see what
> else I can come up with. (I'm thinking there may RIAA and MPAA
> examples that will be useful, but they're not really monopolies in a
> traditional sense. Rather there an example of a harmful collective /
> tribe.)
I believe the proper terms might be "oligopoly" or "conspiracy in
restraint of trade" -- but again, these are old-economy examples
that could have come from a 1980 textbook, nothing like Microsoft.
- Gordon
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Apr 29 2001 - 20:25:46 PDT