Warp wrote:

>   You are confusing standards with monopolies.

Right. My point was that if companies are just left to their own 
devices, they will all invent and deploy incompatible technologies.

For something like washing machines, the fact that one machine is 
"incompatible" with another is largely irrelevant. For anything which 
could be described as a "network", compatibility is usually a Big Deal.

The other problem is assigned numbers. Can you imagine if there were 
three different postal services, each of which assigns completely 
different postcodes to the same addresses? Even if the format of a 
postcode is standardised, you still need a single entity to assign them.

Also, networks usually require some kind of "capacity planning" 
activity. If you let independent parties all do their own thing, you'll 
end up with duplicated effort.

All of this is presumably why almost all services are monopolies.

(Still, I guess it's plausible that you could have a single entity in 
charge of *planning* a service, and have the service actually 
*performed* by several independant companies...)

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