Quote:
Originally Posted by beeman
But the government didnt give BT away they SOLD it to the stock market. They SOLD the exchanges, the copper, the telegraph poles, the monopoly etc. So the fact that the network was build with public funds carrys no weight in the argument as the public have been reimbersed for that investment.
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What it was sold for was not what it would have cost to replicate, or cost to even build in the first place. No one would have paid that, and if it was left to a private business to build a competing network they would NEVER give it the coverage BT's has, they'd cherry pick the most profitable areas (just look at VM's coverage).
That is why it was opened up, not because it was specifically built with public money, but because without public money a huge amount of it would never have been built as it would never have been profitable. It is the network that makes BT a monopoly. They are the only company that has, or will ever have, a network that reaches 99.99% of the population, and they only have that because it was built with public money.