alt Hacker News> What exactly did they prove?
They proved that the Free Market doesn't automatically provide functional competition, if you think about it, the Western-style free market is very keen on creating and maintaining monopolies, even cheating isn't going to help you here.
> The company laid down fibre because of what they saw as a potential competitor (municipal fibre).
The OP is about free market failures, not about competition. As another example, many people have pointed out that there is much more competition in China than in the US. Hope, this is enough for you to understand the difference.
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Markets are just a tool. This tool functions on information. OP explained how information (in this case, the rumor of a competitor laying fiber) caused action within the market.
Hmm. Seems the tool is working as expected.
The OP is about telecom. I took a look and learned [1]:
> The telecommunications industry in China is dominated by three state-run businesses: China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile.
A little slippery to bring China into the telecom free market discussion and contrast it with “Western-style” while failing to mention the structure of its telecom industry.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_industry_in...
Western free market doesn’t create monopolies. Where did you get that idea?
The only place monopolies tend to emerge is heavily regulated areas that allow for regulatory capture (laying fiber is a great example of this).
Free markets don't automatically do anything. There's nothing automatic. It's about giving individual people the opportunity to take action.