Wearing my lawyer hat: The DMCA is not a regulation, it is a statute, passed by Congress & signed by the President. Taking it off: For the "free market uber alles" folk, please read about natural monopolies and the history of "common carrier" regulations. The experience of small farmers and railroads may be especially instructive. For the gentleman who asked for an example of a monopoly in the last century that wasn't related to government regulation, you're going to have to look outside the US. This isn't a coincidence: the Sherman Act, which limited the "free" market in this way was passed in 1895. Beyond our borders, there are plenty of examples. I put free in quotes because I think you'll find that economists make significant distinctions between situations where buyers and sellers have equal power and where they do not. Where they do, monopolies are not a worry. Where sellers have greater power, then a monopoly is one possible negative outcome. That I can name every company that can provide me and have control over a network pipe to the outside world tells me that there are few enough of them that individual sellers have way more power than individual buyers in this market. Seriously, please look up the phrase common carrier. It is a good parallel to the trendy network neutrality phrase and its history night provide some great examples of why regulation can be economically efficient. As always with policy, the devil is in the details. Thomas On Aug 19, 2010 5:09 PM, "Mike Miller" <mbmiller+l at gmail.com<mbmiller%2Bl at gmail.com>> wrote: On Thu, 19 Aug 2010, J.A. Simmons V wrote: > When you sign a contract with your ISP, what do you ex... Not necessarily. With a free market, you get what you get. There are no guarantees. For example, people used to say that a free market would solve the problem of racism because companies that refused to hire people just because they were black would not compete as effectively as companies that based hiring decisions on ability alone. It did not work that way. Companies avoided hiring high-ability black workers for a number of reasons (e.g., most of our customers are probably racists who won't want to work with a black sales rep). It was necessary for the government to force companies to eliminate racial bias in hiring. Government regulation was able to fix what a free market could not fix. Yes, the regulation was a restriction on freedom -- the freedom of companies to hire an all-white work force, or the freedom of white workers not to associate with black people -- but the same regulation enhanced the freedom and opportunity of the black workers. Mike _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesot... -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20100820/a8903ed3/attachment.htm