Re: Why is Mark Zuckerberg angry at critics in India?

Srini,
You appear someone who likes to know why things are the way they are. Nothing exists in this world without a cause. Your observation is very true about some telcos offering faster speed at less.  I have eaten some of the most delicious dishes in a hole in the wall kind of eateries, not in one of those fancy expensive restaurant. Same with rest of businesses.  Business operating at different scale, markets, markets share, regulatory environment etc can offer different price product combination. It happens all the time. 
You can buy a cup of tea at Rs 5 at a road side stall or for Rs 500 at a restaurant across street.

Coming  back to monopolies, I would like you to do similar exercise and think about them. 
I did not put that question to Ken as a rhetorical device. There is a meaning to it.   Reproducing it below again. I would suggest anyone reading it should think about it. 

Quote
Monopolies are rarely permanent.
And during the short period  when it is possible for monopolies to generate above market profits
for its owners, enough suppliers are attracted to the market with better product
and business model to make monopolies ineffective.


Care to list Monopolies that have survived without government protection?
Monopolies and inherently unstable and open to attack.

The communist/socialist economist and ideologues have carefully created fear
of monopolies to justify government takeover of private businesses.

Unquote

Sincerely,
Ratnendra Pandey




Sent from my iPad

> On Jan 4, 2016, at 3:51 AM, Srini RamaKrishnan <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> While I can't claim to have conducted a rigorous data backed study into the matter, when I reflect on the internet scene in India it occurs to be that historically mainstream non-telco ISPs like the urban cable internet operators have always offered better prices and faster speeds than telco ISPs. And why wouldn't they - the telco ISPs have no motivation to offer faster speeds which would eat into their bread and butter of leased lines and voice traffic.
> 
> It doesn't help that Airtel, Tata and Reliance, all telcos own most of the backbone in India that is privately owned. Effectively they control how fast the internet can be in India, and in their ideal world it will be just fast enough so as to maximize their profits. For all their noises for two decades now about triple play, the services aren't there yet, though the tech and the rolled out dark fiber is most definitely there.
> 
> Besides profit maximization, there is also some legacy telco mentality when it comes to pricing.
> 
> Why haven't TRAI or MRTP or the numerous state and central trade commissions and IT ministries done something about this? Answer: regulators in India are asleep at the wheel like they are in much of the world.
> 
> What about the free markets then?
> 
> It should be in the interest of Flipkart, Amazon and other ecommerce retailers besides Google and FB to lobby against this telco monopoly rather than make common cause with the telcos and offer packages like Free Basics. Even if in the long term their customers would be able to access their services faster, they would undoubtedly suffer heavily in the short term by going against the powerful telcos. That is unacceptable, and so they don't.
> 
> Neither free markets nor regulation are perfect answers, but since they both work some of the time, we need to rely on both, as well as law makers, technological innovation and the consumer activists to keep the agenda of progress going.
> 
> To argue that we ought to lose regulators, activists, or any one of the levers that keeps telcos honest and straight is not seeing the full picture.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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