There has never been a good reason to suspect collusion leading to anti-competive activity, if I follow your logic. Never mind the fact that the "spectrum" in question, despite who bribed the government to "own" it, is a public resource?
BTW, the expense comes deeper into the network, not the cost of chips alone, but likely the effects on billing & who is allowed to support the iPhone, for example, and other features requiring engineering that are, in all likelihood, considered "proprietary" (or very close to being alike) to the larger actors' architectures. And when have we seen this before - despite it being far more egregious, arguably, and going for the most part unnoticed?
How about with the more explicit DSL Joint RFP, and a half-decade later in the form of a Joint RFP for FTTP gear in the residential wireline space? In both of those initiatives only the four, and then three RBOCs defined the specifications, thus dictating where economies of scale would exist, despite suboptimal designs for the purposes of the majority of competitors needs.
Agreed, there's nothing new here, but allow me to ask you bluntly:
If the two top players in a space were in fact acting in collusion to exclude all other competitors, would that be okay in your view? --
Anyway, on the lighter-yet-deeper side of commentary, our friend Bob Frankston only moments ago sent the following message to the Open Infrastructure Alliance board:
I find this concept of backhaul strange. What's the BFD about getting an IP connection to a tower? The real problem is in the completely weird idea of licensing colors.
I'm thinking of starting a NGH (Next Gen Haberdasher) by getting the government to grant me an exclusive right to blue. Imagine what I could do if I owned that color. OK, perhaps I can be more precise with the exact shade of blue. The FCC (Federal Color Commission) would be charged with policing 100% of the distribution channels for anything cloth-based and certifying all dyes used in the process to assure that the color usage confirms to standards and doesn't interfere with other uses of colors.
Perhaps we should call it Ultra Royal Blue.
Of course this is expensive but a $1/Shirt surcharge would cover this and with a regulated price $100/shirt (worth it because they would last 100 years) who would notice.
We could have structural separation by keeping the cloth business separate from the shirt business. It would make it easier to use the colors for other purposes as long as they did not cause interference.
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