Stemming from even before the industrial revolution, monopolies have been of importance to American society and beyond. When learning about monopolies in high school, students may learn about larger-than-life figures that dominated American railways, steel, oil, and other industries that were the foundation of America. Nowadays, many of these monopolies have faded away and out of importance, while others have boomed and shaped American legislation and society. In this talk by Dr. Per Bylund, he addresses concerns about monopolies, and whether we should fear them as much as we do. I’ll be commenting on specific industries he spoke of, including streaming, phones, and utilities.
Phones
Smart phones, and more specifically iPhones, immediately come to mind when discussing monopolies. Apple was able to completely reshape the market of technology, phones, which had previously been comprised of flip phones and blackberries and shaped the standard of smart phones to what we have today. While there are some competitors, Apple has without a doubt taken the reign of the market and has become the most desirable phone available. With this, there are positives that the speaker addresses, such as the company having plenty of disposable income to buy out competitors that may be a current or future threat to revenue within the company. This would reward those with innovative ideas and encourage entrepreneurs to create and pursue their passions. One downside that the speaker glosses over is how this may impact consumers. Just because technology is being funded heftily, and the intellectual property is being well compensated, does not mean that the consumer will see the benefit of this transaction. All this may mean is that it is a one-time expense for the company, to ensure the erasure of the competitor, and the guarantee more money down the line. Another new issue that is more commonly seen in new technology and consumer goods is planned obsolescence. This has been an issue surrounding Apple products, including a few years back when Apple intentionally made updates worsen the performance of their devices, forcing consumers to buy new products every few years. They are also notorious for making end-user repairs near impossible, meaning that consumers with device issues are forced to bring their devices to licensed Apple shops for repairs, or to just buy a new device. These issues are not at all at the benefit of the consumer and have only become as prevalent because of how dominant Apple is in the market. *If Apple had a competitor that was as desirable as Apple is, consumers would opt to buy other products than the hard-to-fix Apple phone. *
Streaming
I enjoyed that an audience member brought up streaming, because this is a product that I myself have had issues with recently. I found it interesting that the speaker spoke about streaming services as being able to be created because they offer slightly different services that may be preferable to others that are currently available. I found this interesting because although this talk is nearly two years old, it seems like the opinion of streaming services is rapidly shifting towards being more and more negative. More people are showing displeasure with having to purchase multiple accounts across services to watch content because services are being flooded with shows that they do not want to watch, services are cracking down on password sharing and having devices on accounts that are outside of the set household, and services that used to be add free are forcing consumers to pay a premium to have that same standard that they used to have. Consumers have been looking into ways to circumvent these restrictions and have been increasingly looking into pirating and torrenting content to avoid paying large sums of money for lackluster services.
Utilities
It was interesting to hear about the negatives of monopolies in the context of utility companies, an industry that is government regulated. He spoke about how despite many people finding issue with the cost of utilities, there is very little that they can do because they are often times only one or two utilities companies available to provide these much-needed services. This was very apparent in Texas in the ice storms of 2021, which froze over pipelines and left much of the state of Texas without power. Although the Texas government had the option to diversify the state’s power supply, by joining it with the national power grid, they opted to keep it separate, and hundreds of people died as a result. This is an interesting case where a protected industry failed, and where it may have been better to have it be owned by the federal government instead of the state government.
