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

Pardon me, but that sounds like a defense of the indefensible. Slavery
isn't permanent  either because all slaves eventually rebel.

While monopolies aren't permanent, they can last a bloody long time, and
cause a lot of harm while they last.

Telco ISPs aren't five star restaurants, their service is indifferentiable
from the non-telco ISPs that you impugn as hole-in-the-wall. There isn't a
higher standard of luxury with one over the other or corresponding social
prestige for the customer. The internet is the internet, and that is what
net neutrality seeks to protect.

Of course, once the internet is broken into basic internet, entertainment
internet and professional internet or what have you, it becomes possible to
expend marketing to extract more for the same service.

There's a whole lot of marketing and advertising magic that becomes
ineffective when measured in bits and megabits instead of songs and movies
as some try to do.

Though Facebook currently appears to be the villain of the piece, the
actors to watch out for are the telcos, who intend to protect their
monopolies.

See fur example,
http://www.financialexpress.com/article/industry/companies/telcos-to-oppose-ban-on-differential-data-tariffs/186754/

I'd like to remind everyone of the breakup of Ma Bell, aka AT&T in the US
into Baby Bells.

The telco space like the railroads and banks are always the hotbeds of
monopolies anywhere they exist in the world because they offer a difficult
to switch platform on which numerous service offerings can be made. It is
in their interest always to splinter the platform into tiered services.

India should follow the FCCs example and implement service unbundling in
India and breakup mobile arms of telcos from their backbone and from their
landline services.

Save the internet and other NN campaigners should target the domestic
telcos, who are the ones acting against the interest of the consumer.
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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