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Well, I am from Germany.
We had a monopoly here, allowing ONLY German Telekom (then called
Bundespost) to do business in the field of communications. GT was a part of
the German state - a federal office - and all employees were civil servants,
starting at the top management down to the guy digging up the street and
placing the cables there. It was the same with postal services.
Now, don't confuse a US civil servant with a German one - our's don't pay
income tax and get lots of money compared to a normal worker - if you deduct
the taxes, social security and "Abgaben" - there is no real term for this in
English, it is another kind of tax in every sense but the legal one. It is
said the Eskimos have 50 different words for snow - we Germans have 50
different words for tax - but I disgress.
The monopoly had a rather severe impact on German online-services and BBS in
the 80's and 90's. You could only have a modem if it had the approval seal
of the GT. So a 56kbps modem that could be had for 50 dollars in the US was
sold by our bureaucrats for the equivalent of 500 dollars. Much cost for a
little sticker on the back of the modem. So either you were rich or used
illegally imported modems - or did not use modems at all, which most people
did. Hey, you even had to rent the actual phone from the GT in addition to
paying monthly for the line itself.
Find the old phones you had to rent here: actually these were quite hip at
the time.
http://schnitzler-aachen.de/Surftipps/Bundespost_1984_b.jpg
The standard model was mouse-grey platics with a dial. We had, at more
monthly cost, a green phone with dial. We used it until 1996. See a similar
phone below:
http://www.2blum.de/images/FeTAp611-2a.jpg
Now, I think it was a blessing when the Bundespost had to give up the
monopoly. However, I think it would be fair to grant a time-limited monopoly
on their own cables for any telco which actually digs up the ground and puts
IT-infrastructure in. Whoever pays for the new cables could be sure to reap
the profits. This way VDSL would spread into rural Germany much faster.
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