Monopolies can breed competition



By Robert DeLaurentis

South Coast Beacon



Technology breeds monopolies like bacteria in a culture dish. From Standard Oil in the 19th century to Microsoft today, the history of the industrial revolution is a roadmap that careens from one anti-competitive business to another.

I am not talking about the legal definition of a monopoly, but the everyday sort. If your list of options totals one, then for practical purposes your choice boils down to take it or leave it, which is not a choice at all.

Cable companies have had a practical monopoly since their inception. There is pseudo-competition when a carrier’s contract with the local municipality is up for renewal, but when Joe Customer wants to purchase cable TV, the choice is take it or leave it.

Yet, what technology bestows, it also takes away. Standard Oil owned the oil business until the Mellon family discovered black gold in Beaumont. Along came Texaco and Gulf Oil, and before anyone knew it the oil industry went from a one-vendor monopoly to a competitive marketplace.

The liberation of TV signal delivery has followed the same basic path. Cable companies, which owned their customers, have suddenly found themselves besieged by upstart direct satellite broadcasters.

Ever since satellite TV’s debut a decade ago, dishes have sprouted on rooftops like wildflowers in spring. The pictures are much sharper than plain old cable, and the sound quality equals compact disks.

In our area, the last hurdle in transforming TV signal delivery from a monopoly to a true competitive marketplace has finally been surmounted. Several weeks ago Dish Network (dishnetwork.com) began carrying the local broadcast stations on its system.

Until now, if you wanted to drop the cable company to enjoy high quality TV signals, you needed to use a rooftop antenna or continue to subscribe to basic cable for local programming. Neither choice is very user-friendly, since the multiple remote controls made something as simple as changing the channel tantamount to calculating the launch window for a Vandenberg rocket.

Well, those days are over as the layers of needless complexity have been stripped away. Now an integrated satellite receiver and personal video recorder is all it takes to enjoy high-quality, on-demand TV signals.

It gets better. With subscribers fleeing cable for satellite, Cox has announced that they will begin offering similar devices to their digital cable subscribers, although it may be several months before the service is available South Coast residents.

Isn’t competition wonderful?

Robert DeLaurentis has been working with computers or writing about technology for almost 20 years.

He can be contacted at www.robertdelaurentis.com.