[efaith]

I don't take issue with your conclusion, but I don't think the Internet is a natural monopoly. It's not the Internet itself that is sold, after all, but access to the Internet, and it's entirely possible for two access providers to compete with each other to sell access to the Internet. There is only one Internet, but there isn't only one access provider to the Internet.

At the moment I'm online via cell phone tethering, and I have a choice of several different providers of that tethering from the very location that I am writing this. My provider hardly qualifies as a monopoly if I can choose from several competing providers if my provider decides to block certain content. I suspect that over time wireless will become even bigger.

Television cable companies are currently the fastest and most ubiquitous providers of broadband access to the Internet, and these are indeed somewhat monopolistic. I have my choice among cable broadband providers but I understand that not everyone has my choices. For those people, their broadband provider is an effectively a monopoly. However, this is just one moment in time. How will things be five and ten years down the road? At the moment, cable broadband access to the Internet is a monopoly for many customers, but I don't think this should be taken as a fundamental statement about the Internet itself. Over the years access to the Internet has evolved and it will keep on evolving. I put the probability that we will be at the mercy of our tv cable broadband providers ten years from now at close to 0%.

UNLESS the government intervenes! If the government intervenes, then all bets are off. The government can use its power to create and maintain a monopoly. In fact, this is what the government did with telephone access and also US mail. Ma Bell (which you may or may not remember) and the US Post Office were not natural monopolies, but government monopolies. They are both similar to the Internet in that they connected people in far-away places, so the analogy is not that bad. My point is that it was government that made them (for a time) monopolies by making competition illegal.

Anyway, sorry for the length. I just wanted to address that particular point.