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Comment by snrplfth | Hacker News Reader

Well, Comcast's oligopoly is largely established by the fact that rights-of-way and pole-attachment rights are monopolized by municipalities, which tend to approve only a single, or few providers. It's not a natural monopoly.

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> Comcast's oligopoly is largely established by the fact that rights-of-way and pole-attachment rights are monopolized by municipalities, which tend to approve only a single, or few providers.

Only because, when municipalities do try to treat bandwidth as a public utility, which they can sell to all providers equally, Comcast and other large ISPs sue them.

> It's not a natural monopoly.

I agree, but I don't think it is primarily local municipalities that are propping it up.

I think it's the structure of rights-of-way, pole-attachments and so forth as monopolies that props it up. The fact that municipalities get sued for trying to sell bandwidth is a problem, but it emerges, I think, because of the fact it's centralized in a government institution.

To some extent, provisioning for bandwidth is a natural monopoly, for the same reason that provisioning for electrical service, water, sewer, and other utilities are natural monopolies. It doesn't make sense to run multiple different electrical, water, and sewer services to the same neighborhood just so multiple different providers can compete; the costs of all that extra infrastructure are too high. The costs aren't as high for bandwidth, but they aren't zero either.

As the size of the "municipality" goes up, though, I agree with you that centralization creates monopolies that are not natural.

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