Russell Coker via luv-talk wrote:
I think that every company that has a monopoly should be government owned. If a company gets a monopoly or cartel position they should either be compulsarily broken up or compulsarily purchased by the government.
If we have toll roads then they should be owned by the government. The government should own all monopolostic public transport (IE all trans but not necessarily all buses), Telstra, and the electricity and gas suppliers.
Then the citizens can vote on how those companies should be run.
I think the term you're looking for is "natural monopoly". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly I was quite pleased to hear that the NBN was going to be a state-owned monopoly wholesaler, with capitalist competition in the retail part. Clearly they had learned their lesson from the AT&T/Bell breakup. Except that didn't happen, and no my Dad's apartment has *TWO, COMPETING* NBN-like FTTP lines, while most of the country has none. i.e. it's exactly the same as when Telstra and Optus laid out competing Cable networks to the same streets, and the entire west coast missed out completely. Sigh.