It sure is brutal trying to stay connected if you’re on a very tight budget.
Anyone remember how 6 years ago, it was in the news how American telecoms started offering unlimited full speed mobile data? The only reason that didn’t come to Canada was that “data caps were too lucrative.”
If Canadians weren’t so nice maybe we wouldn’t all just roll over and pay magnitudes more for fractions of what every other developed country in the world gets.
One has to wonder… Why doesn’t a single company just roll in and offer unlimited mobile data and shake things up? Oligopoly is the word you’re looking for, a handful of companies (ie the “big three”) operating together like a single, corporate monstrosity known as a monopoly thanks to the popularized board game
Because they can make more money investing the same resources into the existing corrupt oligopoly. The big three are all heavily invested in each other; the reasons why none of them make a big move to try and disrupt the other two are the exact same reasons no other whale comes along and messes up the racket. It is better for capital this way!!
This context should make this all the more obvious: in the end, there is no competition between entrenched capital because it’s all the same capital.
Continue the thought exercise to its logical conclusion:
A new big player comes in and attempts to disrupt the marketplace
A price war ensues where two or three major players try to underbid each other with loss leaders and attractive features users demand
Everyone else is bled to death because they don’t have billions of dollars in their war chests to run at a loss for five or ten years
Either the war continues until there are is one, or the remaining parties revert to an oligarchy and start cooperating
The new “big three” exploit their market position to raise prices and strip features so they can recoup all the money they burned to bury their competition and make the whole thing worthwhile
This was a nice vacation for consumers, but what is in it for investors? Why would they piss away all that money trying to claw market share away from Brand X when they can just buy shares of Brand X? They have been working for more than a century to create the market conditions that exist right now, they only stand to lose by disrupting it.