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Comment by jfruh | Hacker News Reader

I'm always amused when tech types (who tend to lean libertarian) act so outraged when something they purchase doesn't correspond to costs + some "fair" markup. (People seem particularly fixated on the prices of ebooks and text messages, for some reason.) Do you want to question the basis of capitalism and the free market? I'm all for it! But if you don't, don't complain when companies charge what the market will bear. Don't hate the players, hate the game.

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I think the objection here is to the cell phone market, which more resembles a cross between an oligopoly and a cartel than a free market. You only have a handful of players and giant barriers to entry, so it's not easy to send a real signal about your unhappiness or choose an alternative.

Exactly. And there's obvious collusion, as when all the carriers raised text messaging prices nearly simultaneously a few years ago.

A "free market" doesn't necessarily lead to a bunch of competitors. Everyone has this picture of a free market with 20 competitors and low prices, but a free market doesn't always work out that way. A couple of years ago we had a bunch of cell phone companies to choose from, but they keep merging because the infrastructure costs kill the small players. A small part of that is regulation, but most of it is just the intrinsic cost of building and maintaining a telecom network.

Maybe not, but there will be very low barriers to entry.

G+ could be created by anybody who had the dollars to buy enough servers (and the engineering capability to build it), it did not require a government license.

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