Likely the only way your friends at that small business would ever get prompt service from comcast is if someone with a decent size internet platform (that's you) named and shamed.

That's a somewhat narrow view of Libertarians. There are many who view antitrust as a reasonable function of government. I think harping on libertarians is probably a distraction from the real topic here - which is whether two large companies in the same business but with largely non-overlapping markets should be allowed to merge.

If you take the libertarians suck approach you leave yourself open to the fact that these companies have gained the monopolistic power they have through misguided government regulations. Libertarians would say that government created the problem in the first place and while that is somewhat simplistic, it's a fair argument.

So instead of taking the easy way out and pointing fingers at a political group you don't like or agree with why not tackle the actual issue. It's complex and worthy of a smarter approach than this.

I get a ton of service from both Comcast Business (cable) and Comcast Enterprise (fiber), and the service and support have always been outstanding. I used to get it from TWTelecom (Time Warner's spun-off internet business, not part of this deal) and it was SHOCKINGLY HORRIBLE on both counts.

Given that Comcast derives its quasi-monopoly status from government privilege, it's a bit of a stretch to pin this on libertarianism.

I think your friend might be exaggerating a tad bit, on the one to six month delay in service attention.

And, YES, there are competitors to Comcast for business internet services.

Good luck with this argument.

You would have thought in 2008, with the entire financial system and world economy damaged by deregulation of Wall Street game-playing that the previous decade of deregulation and hyper-fincancialization of the economy would have been completely discredited, but no. Fuckers doubled down and said it was just that we didn't deregulate ENOUGH.

If a situation that clear and well-known didn't get traction, this kind of inside baseball isn't going to convince anybody to change their minds.

I thought the libertarian argument was that if you want internet, you go out and create your own internet for your own personal use.

Yes. This needs to be said, repeatedly. All this fearmongering and outrage of "government controlling our lives" is just a scare tactic to serve as a smokescreen about the real takeover of personal freedom by gargantuan corporations that only answer to their shareholders and aren't accountable to the people. The unregulated free market truly does quickly extinguish itself. The Sherman Antitrust Act was precisely supposed to clear the field of these greedy cancers, but nobody talks about it anymore.

@2 and @4, I know it's faux-American and patriotic to rail against the government, the faceless, hollow boogeyman that's relatively harmless, that's there to protect you and provide the things you can't do on your own. But if the government has stood by and let the capitalist market run amok - and it has - it's because the corporate behemoths have bought it and now they write the rules and control the game in the way that best benefits them, not the increasingly powerless voters who spend their energy bickering among themselves.

@8 Yes. I'm going to go out to the hardware store right now so I can get me some parts so I can build my own internet.

@1: Paul did name and shame. The name is Comcast, and they don't give a shit, because their purpose is to maximize profits, not to provide quality service.

Why is it that Libertarians will scream all day and night about the government infringing on their freedoms but when a business does the same thing it's just peachy? I get mailed a ballot to elect members of our government, but I can't deal with a large company because of the insane layers of management and absentee landlordism that goes on.

I can't even participate in shareholder votes because the miniscule number of shares I own are part of a mutual or index fund. Combine that with the fact that every solution libertarianism is reactive rather than proactive, and you've got a real winner there!

Once you get deep into libertarianism, you even find out they don't believe in hypothesis testing. It's a belief system for children, nothing more.

@2

Which 'libertarians' of any renown have ever said anti-trust is a function of government?

Laissez faire capitalism or anarcho-capitalism (Libertarianism) has always lead to greater inequalities, and the concentration of money and power into fewer hands. It is in fact difficult to see monopolies as a failure of libertarianism since its most prominent proponents always benefit from it and one has to conclude that greater concentration of wealth is the intended result. Consumer choice and protection exist thanks to government regulation.

This is the fundamental problem when your money supply is based on the rules of "positive-interest". Profit is the only ethic.
Monopoly is the natural form to gravitate towards, and squeezing costs (parts & labor) to improve profits is inevitable.

The problem lies within the very tools we are using.

Ah...this actually proves libertarianism works. As a libertarian I hate big government...AND I ALSO HATE BIG CORPORATIONS. Liberals seem to live in this false dichotomy that you can't possibly be against big business and big government at the same time.
The problem with Comcast and every other big corporation is that government is keeping them in power and keeping new competition down. Do you have any idea the regulations and expense you have to go through to open a new internet provider?

Comcast, like other corporations, use their lobbying power to pass regulations that make it harder for competitors to open up and challenge them. If government didn't have the power to pass regulations on anything but safety and environmental protection (two kinds of regulations most Libertarians are fine with) this wouldn't happen and Comcast would find new competitors popping up.

An example of this is American sugar. The sugar companies have used their money to make it so expensive to import cheap sugar that it allows them to set the price on American grown sugar higher than it should be. That's one of the reasons why colas in other countries (like Mexico) taste so much better: they don't have such corporate-sponsored regulations and hence sugar over their is cheaper, while in America sugar is so expensive most soda companies have to use corn syrup.
Source: http://public.wsu.edu/~hallagan/EconS327…

The author of this article seems to not understand that Libertarianism are NOT pro-corporatism and that most corporations would FIGHT TOOTH AND NAIL to keep libertarians from getting elected, and they have. Ask yourself this: why did corporations donate to every Republican candidate and Obama, but none donated to Ron Paul?

The LAST THING corporations want is real capitalism, in which they would lose their privileges and be expected to survive or die on their own. No more corporate welfare, no more bailouts, no more regulations that keep competitors from rising to challenge to status quo.

Corporations like Comcast don't want the capitalism libertarians would force them to compete in. What they want is what they have: corporatism, in which the state and the corporations are so close that the two have been fused. Hence the only real, justifiable position is to reduce the size of both.

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini

@12
I actually hate big corporations just as much as I do big government. Real libertarians understand that they are the exact same thing, as corporations and government have become one and hence they are both the enemy.

I'm a Left-Libertarian. This cartoon that I ironically saw in the Stranger says it best: http://leftycartoons.com/the-24-types-of…

We exist, but nobody seems to notice that...and a big part of that is that so many libertarians can't articulate the message properly and that people think the Tea Party is libertarian. That and too many libertarians have gone away from our anarchist roots.

I recommend anyone read "Markets, not Capitalism" by Gary Chartier to get a better picture.

@14
No, that is not the case. In a Laissez-fair system monopolies would be rare, as most monopolies are in fact government sponsored.

Look at what the GOP is doing to keep the competition Tesla Motors is offering away from the public and then try to tell me we live in a free-market system. Source: http://gas2.org/2014/02/13/ohio-republic…

Monopolies in a free market system wouldn't last long because without government to keep them in power, corporations would be rendered essentially harmless.

The greatest myths about libertarians are that we don't care about the poor (we do, we just want communities to take care of them voluntarily as opposed to through government and involuntary taxation) and that we are corporatist. Capitalism is NOT corporatism.

@12,

My general rule of thumb is, if a company won't give me good customer service and if I can't, for whatever reason, fix a problem with a good or service myself, I don't do business with that company ever again. The degree to which companies expect you to waste hours of your time "resolving" a problem is fucking staggering. Case in point: last month I couldn't access the online payment system for my credit card. For days, I got a "we encountered a technical problem, please try again later" message. The company flat-out refused to address the problem unless I called them directly. So I told them, if I have to call you to get you to fix your Internet portal, the call I make will be to cancel my card.

Why should anyone have to put up with that shit?

This isn't a fight about libertarianism. Most cable companies operate under city or state-run franchises which are either exclusive or create such a barrier to entry to the marketplace that competition is not truly existent. In Seattle, there are basically two cable providers, Comcast and Wave. They operate in completely different distinct franchise areas and do not compete with each other. The only real competitor to either of the two cable providers in broadband is CenturyLink - and they've been trying to get the city to fix its rules involving telecom cabinets so they can be competitive.

@collectivism sucks

I would point out that government is community. Taxes are not involuntary, they are what your fellow citizens, past and present agreed to pay to accomplish things together. You may not like what the majority wants to build and you are free to move to a community that better fits your ideals.
You may argue against current corporate subsidies and the revolving door of ceo to politician to lobbyist and our complacent corrupted two party system and I'd be right there with you. However, i don't believe subsidies are inherently evil, they are used to encourage innovation and promote competition.
I guess what it boils down to is libertarians, very much akin to the Tea Party people, think government is evil and should be done away with. Where I would argue government just needs to be more agile and accountable to the governed.

@13 - Adam Smith (for one).

(1) Wimax
(2) LTE
(3) Optical fiber
(4) Satellite Internet (yes, it's back and it's pretty cheap)

@21: He subscribes to the wacko-bananas definition of "voluntary". Basically, even though taxes are enacted through representative democracy, they're still coercive according to that line of reasoning. Why? Because if you don't pay your taxes, you'll eventually have money taken away from you by force and you might be thrown in jail. By that logic, if you sign a contract and then are forced to honor the terms of that contract, you're being coerced.
Many people here, including me, have explained shit to him plenty of times. Unfortunately, to quote Swift, "It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into."

@22

And progressive taxation. If a guy who wants the governemnt to break up monopolies and tax the rich more than the poor is a libertarian, then "libertarian" doesn't mean anything.

Smith thought free markets were good. Libertarians think markets are a panacea.

My CATV rates kept going way up after Comcast bought out AT&T Broadband. I finally said enough three years ago. Thank God I live in a neighborhood that has FIOS as an alternative.

Muni fiber.

My one argument with @collectivism_sucks is that I completely disagree that Laissez-faire capitalism wouldn't result in monopolies: It most certainly would. Once a corporation is big enough, they will actively tread on smaller dogs to eliminate the competition, or buy them up to bring them in their fold.

Corporations are "fortunate" to have the Gov't available to coerce into doing their bidding in the ways you describe. But if the Gov't wasn't there, corp's would hire their own armies and enforce their own rules, becoming mini-states unto themselves. They would to anything and everything to protect their monopoly status (or intentions) including shooting striking workers, and bombing the competition out of existence. With no Gov't to apply laws against murder, corporations would definitely resort to that to get their (monopoly) ways.

Other than that, your definition of corporatism is very apt and should be brought into wider usage.

@24
Aside from the appeal to ridicule fallacy you invoke (calling ideas "wacko" in a childish manner as opposed to sticking to facts and logic) you completely miss the point. Yes, we live in what is in theory at least a "representative democracy." However, that is the problem with democracy. It is essentially the majority, even a majority of 51%, bullying the minority, even a minority of 49%.

Where does it end? If 51% can vote money away from the 49%, is it also okay for straight people (another majority) to vote rights away from gays? (another minority)

The answer is no. Just because the government can and does do it, doesn't mean it is moral. Also, we are not the government. If that was the case than every victim of police brutality was just "self-mutilated". After all, the victim does own the police.
If the idea that "we are the government" is correct, than does that make YOU responsible for the war in Iraq? After all, it was YOUR government that did it.

We are not the government and we cannot opt out of the government. The solution is to minimize government and maximize voluntary community.

An alternative is to create voluntary taxation and voluntary services. A real world example of this already exists: home school co-ops in which the community, not government, pays and works together to educate children. This is different from government schools in that it no one is forced to pay into it or participate in it.
http://www.washhomeschool.org/homeschool…

Likewise, as libertarians slowly gain more power (and we are) you can expect to see a slow but steady transition from government enforced programs to voluntary, community controlled programs.

For example: You may get a letter from the government saying Social Security is no going to be optional, and if you like you can either A) keep your own coverage the way it is and pay the same as you've been paying in B) decline either your retirement or your disability benefit and double the coverage of one or the other or C) decline SS all together and instead pay only enough to help those people already dependent on the program (the already retired) but get nothing in return. The result would be seeing your payroll taxes cut in half.

Then, after a time, we would slowly turn SS from a government program that gets raided to fund the latest wars of aggression to a non-profit co-op run by those who choose to pay into it.
^^but I guess the above makes me an "Ayn Rand sociopath" as so many liberals jump to call us.

@28
I was a Marxist for awhile but slowly changed my mind. One of the things that made me change my mind was when someone showed me, too my shock, that monopolies very rarely happen without government aid and that when they do happen naturally they never last long.
However, as I and most libertarians, despite what the media may tell you, are pragmatic, I would be okay with anti-trust laws. I just think that it's pointless to have anti-trust laws if you don't do something about corporate welfare first.
Ideally we wouldn't have a government this in bed with the giant corporations to begin with. But as it stands now, they have been helping corporations for so long that a few laws to undo the damage government has caused may be in order (i.e., anti-trust laws)

Still, we also have to get corporations off of welfare and end the bailouts. And the way to do that is by ending subsidizes and bailouts. By the way, most liberal democrats supported the bailouts while libertarians had fits over them, and poor Ron Paul looked like he was about to pass out on the floor of congress when they passed.

@25
There are many kinds of libertarians. Many are pragmatic and simply want smaller government, i.e., classic liberals. I've met plenty who are fine with regulations, as long as they aren't too crazy and only effect the largest corporations. Saying all libertarians are extremists and all are against taxing the rich, anti-trust laws etc is just as absurd as saying all socialists want to build Gulag camps and purge people they don't like.

I personally want a slow transition to minimum government and understand that such a transition has got to be a "strategic withdrawal" as opposed to a messy retreat. That may include ending a number of regulations while creating a few new ones or, better yet, actually enforcing the ones we have.

For example: many libertarians, like myself, are opposed to most new environmental regulations but want the penalties for breaking the existing ones to change from fines to prison time. After the first three CEOs go to jail for polluting, you can bet the rest of corporate America will stop polluting. Fines, on the other hand, just go to fund more big government and corporations just factor them into their overall expenses and keep on polluting.

@28
And I am minarchist more than an anarcho-capitalist. I would of course want taxation and such to keep a military and police funded, so that if any corporation does build a corporate army it would be in violation of a non-aggression principle and therefore be destroyed.
And unfortunately, there already is a corporate-army: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academi

Want to know something funny? None of the gun control advocates have purposed any laws that would disarm companies like Academi, aka Blackwater. Instead they want to go after private citizens, preventing them from, in theory (a bit far fetched, I admit, but go with it for a second) forming militias to fight Blackwater.

Another example of government regulation (gun control) keeping corporations intact (Academi keeps their guns) while stomping on the rights of average Americans (no private, community militias)

America isn't a capitalist country: it is socialism for the rich. No way in hell does any libertarian support this system.

@33
EXACTLY! Comcast, along with Goldman Sach's has Obama bought. That's why this happened: government cornyism, aka corporatism.
That brings up the question no left-wing opponent of Libertarianism can answer: if libertarianism will be good for corporations, then why don't corporations donate to libertarian candidates? They gave millions to every GOP candidate except for Ron Paul and millions to Obama.
And it's not because "corporations know they can't win" because they also gave millions to Herman Cain despite the fact that he wasn't anywhere near as strong a candidate as Ron Paul.
Follow the money: corporations fear capitalism even more than they fear socialism. Nothing scares them more than losing their government support and be forced to (gasp!) make a profit honestly through offering better products and better prices or go out of business. They know that is what libertarians will force them to do, unlike the corporate owned democrats and republicans, and hence they will never donate to libertarian campaigns.

@32 - Well, I meant a corporate army such as a fully-armed Walmart "Security Force" that has machine guns, tanks and suchlike. Blackwater/Xe/Academi is nothing new, the Pinkerton's shot striking worker at the behest of corporations a century ago. As my brother says, "Nothing has changed except the caliber."

I will look into this "monopolies *only* exist bcz of govt" concept. Never heard that before. If you happen to read this thread again, and have any pointers, please post them.

Can we please stop pretending that libertarianism means no government? Can we also please stop pretending as though these massive corporations aren't empowered by the friendly laws and subsidies their friends in government create?

Corporations love Corporate Welfare too. Libertarians are against that too. Don't blame libertarians on the already corrupt market. Made corrupt by government intervention.