I didn't have to search much to find an article talking about the corruption in the Brazilian telecommunications free market: https://teletime.com.br/10/12/2019/o-passado-mal-explicado-das-telecomunicacoes-no-brasil/ Sure, you can argue that many of these companies simply went bankrupt, but the weight of those bankruptcies falls on the same shoulders every time: private profit, public loss. Sure, there were a lot of telecoms opening at that time due to the government opening up the market, but at what cost?

[–] brenno@lemmy.brennoflavio.com.br 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sorry, I'm not following you. We're discussing if deregulation is always bad or not, and my point is that it can be bad in excess.

The article points to some corruption that happened at the time, which is correct, but it does not discuss anything about the benefits (or lack of it) for the end user after the deregulation.

If we could prove that if we kept excess regulation in the market as it was before, people still could have access to telecommunication as we have today, my point should be wrong. But its not the article discussion or what you're saying now.

Notice that I'm not defending 100% deregulation, even in the Brazilian example the market is still regulated today, just way less than it was 20 years ago. If we have no data caps for residential internet around here, its because of a regulation, not companies good faith for example.

Out of curiosity I asked chatgpt to list examples similar to the Brazilian one and it listed a few:

United Kingdom - Energy Deregulation Japan - Rail Deregulation New Zealand - Telecommunications Deregulation Australia - Banking Deregulation Sweden - Postal Service Deregulation

Truth is, its really hard to prove that something "is always" good or bad, as it will need to go over all cases and prove the point one by one. Normally economic discussions are applied to a society or sector, so we could say "in the US deregulation is often bad", which is much more fair and easy to prove.

[–] pgp@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's true, there are factors that will make things sort of work, or make them go downhill very fast. In Portugal, there was a lot of deregulation in the past few 20 years, which brought higher prices, monopolies and fixed prices. That's my main reason for not believing in deregulation, but I understand that there may be exceptions to this. I just think that they're precisely that: exceptions to the rule.

Also, I love that I'm having a deep conversation in the memes community!