Learning to live with monopolies

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Editor's note: A spectre is haunting India—the spectre of corporate monopoly. With VI bleeding subscribers and its finances in disarray (leading to the government taking a 36% stake in the firm), and BSNL barely managing to keep its subscriber base and unable to invest further in its network, Airtel and Jio now collectively account for almost 77% of wireless subscribers and 80% of all broadband connections in the country. With mobile number portability making subscriber loyalty a thing of the past, it is not unlikely that the Indian telecom market will end up in a duopoly. This degree of industry concentration is highly reminiscent of the trajectory of American telecom in the 20th century. Please join me on a short historical detour. In the late 1800s in the US and Europe, when the telephone was first being adopted, there were often multiple parallel wired networks for telephony in the same geography. Calling people on other networks was difficult if not impossible—network operators would often intentionally make interconnection problematic. Each network tried to dominate its own territory and the entire industry was a …