Monopoly and Thoughts

Reading this article several things came to mind. I live in Brazil and the word "monopoly" has a whole different meaning here. Let me explain it a bit. Although semantically "monopoly" means the same as in US, UK, or any place, most of Brazilian monopolies were government granted to "protect" the national industries.

Back in the 70's and 80's, and for part of the 90's, our telephone services were provided by state operated companies. Huge white elephants that could only operate because the government droped a buckload of tax money every time. Just to give you an idea, a phone line could be places as an asset on your income tax form. Back in those days if you needed a phone line, you could buy on the parallel market for something around $10,000 up to $50,000, depending on location.

In the 90's most of those government issued monopolies started to be broken down, by privatization of the state companies, generating better prices and services. Nowadays, any person can buy a mobile phone line for something like $5. And if you're willing to sign a 12 months agreement, you'd also could get the phone for free.

Anyway, back to the case at hand, when I see a "monopoly" that was built out of the benefits that a certain company provide to the users, and the success of a private company, I do get a bit mesmerized with it. To most Brazilians, older than 35 years old, this is an almost alien concept. Almost.

As the author of the article suggests, there isn't a single "monopoly" on the internet, more like several different ones, on different segments. But the problem is, most of the companies that places their business on the internet, be them big or small, fail at one basic thing. The world isn't their own backyard.

Is Amazon a monopoly? Well, they might be in US or UK, but they don't sell everything in their catalog to Brazil. Heck, the S&H alone sometimes is twice the price of the item.