It was too long ago that Rogers Communication bought out Shaw in what many people feared would result in increased pricing. Sure enough, just recently companies like rogers have announced bill increases for its customers. One interesting thing is this may generate an investigation to see why the company is doing this I suppose to see if they are just trying to squeeze more money out of people. One of the pitches to the company merge was that prices would say go down. I don’t think many people believed that of course.
But one response from officials was people should simply think about changing carriers if they don’t agree with the pricing as an example and you can imagine people aren’t happy with that. While it’s true that you can vote with your dollar as technically if everyone left to a competitor then the company would have no real choice but to drop rates. However, in the case of a phone service there are factors such as if a company has a monopoly of sort on the service towers then you wouldn’t have much choice in reality but to use them.
Imagine if there was one high speed Internet service provider with the others only able to offer dial-up speed because of this monopoly. Telling people to just go with the companies that have no resources to even compete on the same level isn’t practical. Which then leads to the question, do you expect the government to pass laws to help with pricing in these cases instead where you spend your energy in trying to make that happen?
If this was simply something like a restaurant, I am pretty sure most people would have the let the market decide attitude. But how about in these cases where the services are deemed essential for most people?