Quote:
Originally Posted by beeman
What your talking about is sellers regret, something that cannot bee used as an excuse for tighter legislation, as it would make life very difficalt for the government should they need to engange the city again (remember the railtrack disaster) and would proberlly bee illegal.
Alough there main bee some element of sellers regret in the regulation of BT's monopoly. for the most part its purely about preventing a company abusing its monopoly. Something that is very common (we even have a specific government department with very wide reaching powers to prevent private company's abusing its donamint market position (the competition (commission (formally the less powerful monopoly's and mergers commission)).
Also remember as i said before the majority of skys network infructure was also build with public funds (astra).
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It's nothing to do with sellers regret at all.
When people say it's because it was paid for with public funds what they actually mean is that no corporation would ever put that level of investment into it because they'd never see a return, and so the only reason it exists is because it was publicly funded.
It's making the point that it's not possible to launch a network to compete with it, and the reason that's not possible is because it's not financially viable to do so. No one can come in to the telephone market and go "you know what, I'm going to build a telephone network that rivals BTs" they'd go bankrupt before they started.
The reason BT was a monopoly was not just because it was the only company offering a high level of coverage, but it was the only company that COULD, and the only reason it could, was because, you guessed it, it's network was built with public money.
Sky is entirely different because it IS economical to launch a satellite system to compete with it, or rent access off any of the existing ones.
It's not just the fact public money was used, but the fact that without it it'd never have happened.