I'm a lot more negative now than before I posted. Sorry for pointing out the fact that no proof exists that patents encourage innovation. Keep believing fairy tales kids.
The problem is caused by bad government, but the solution is good government, as exemplified by the BT story. A completely free market would lead to a monopoly in broadband anyways. The irony here is that the government is not doing anything to solve the problem.
Government getting the hell out of the way of people voluntarily interacting the marketplace is the best situation.
For example: cable easements. Get rid of them. Get rid of all easements. Without them, you would have a variety of options and methods of gaining access to a number of utilities (internet, power, etc) as well as new services that have not yet been created.
Easements and the monopoly they sanction are the reasons that everyone in an area can get service at all. If they had to write a private contract that would cover the absurdly high cost of laying cable, it would make a cell phone contract look like a love note. It would have to be a covenant imposed on every tenant of the building for many years. It would be just like regulation, only written by people with an immediate incentive to do it as abusively as possible.
Real-world markets lack infinite competition and perfect transparency, so they pretty routinely fail to deliver optimal solutions. Many famously wealthy people got there by exploiting strategies to make markets fail.
If no one enforces laws that prevent underhanded tactics in business, how is that a healthy market? And don't say that consumers would naturally avoid companies that collude together to raise prices or put lead in paint.
Specifically in this scenario, how could the British government remaining uninvolved with the BT situation have led to a better market?
You don't need government to do anything to end up with monopolies, especially in activities with very high cost-of-entry such as utilities or telecommunications.
Ma Bell became a natural monopoly all on its own, and barring an extremely disruptive entry into the market (which is, again, extremely difficult in high-entry-cost markets since the rate of new entry is so low) it will consolidate over time as the current incumbents reach the limits of possible organic growth.
The only reason we don't have most metropolitan areas with gigabit fiber to the door is almost entirely teleco/cable easements.
The day you stop government from mandating one company per area or delimiting it to a small few monopolistic entities and allow a free market is the day we stop dealing with the hell that is becoming us.
The answer is quite simply LESS government, dammit.
That clearly isn't the answer, as the article spends many paragraphs explaining.
The answer is "do things that encourage competition and investment". The US government fails at this, but it is neither a limitation of government per se or easily achieved by private enterprise alone.
The article argues that good situations resulted from government action. The reality is that while these situations are viewed as good, they are not neccessarily the best. Only when individuals are able to voluntarily interact in the market do the best services and products meet the best prices and innovation is at its highest. One of the main factors that does not permit government from being able to exist in a market in a positive way in comparison is due to a complete lack of price model interaction. Government (by its very nature) does not depend on consumer response (price model). It thus has no way of allocating resources as efficiently as it would were it to exist without tax dollars (confiscated property, not gained through competition or voluntary interaction). As such, it cannot gauge weather or not the things it is doing are the best or the most effective to meet the demand.
There are mountains of writing on the basics of free markets and Austrian Economics, if you would like me to link you to some resources.
Oh, I don't think he was saying that wasn't the case. I believe what he meant (perhaps I am projecting here) that because it continues to exist, and exist successfully, the idea of free software wins.
The mere continued existence of free software/open source validates the ideology behind it.
As a libertarian/dyed in the wool capitalist, I love the success myself.
I am right there with you. Sometimes I need an energy drink to make one part of my brain catch up with the other, or it's a beer or two.
Frankly, I would have never finished college were it not for a strange mix of kidney-liver assaulting caffeine/alcohol liquids concurrently being imbibed. At times it seems the solution is the same for writing code for extended periods of time..
