It's real-world capitalism thought through to the end. You can monetize any service to anyone, even more so when there is a lack of a proper free market in certain niches.
The real-world system named "capitalism" by its critics has never featured free markets in practice, it has always featured a system structured to favor holders of capital.
OTOH, the central feature of both real-world capitalism and the more utopian "free market" idealized form is government establishment and protection of property rights, which are precisely government-granted monopolies.
> OTOH, the central feature of both real-world capitalism and the more utopian "free market" idealized form is government establishment and protection of property rights, which are precisely government-granted monopolies.
That's just equivocating two meanings of the same word though. A title to real estate is a "monopoly" over a piece of land, but it isn't inherently a "monopoly" in the sense that you have no competitors. If you own an apartment building but someone else owns a similar one across the street from you, you have competition. You don't own every apartment building. And it's only in the second sense that a monopoly would be problematic.
Property is a monopoly on the economic sense (giving market/pricing power) whenever the thing over which property is held has no perfect substitute. This is often the case with real property, and also with much intellectual property. It's sometimes, though less often, the case with tangible personal property.
> Property is a monopoly on the economic sense (giving market/pricing power) whenever the thing over which property is held has no perfect substitute.
Which is hardly the common case for an individual piece of real estate. You don't even need perfect substitutes as long as the substitutes are close enough to prevent monopoly pricing.
> This is often the case with real property, and also with much intellectual property.
"Intellectual property" isn't normal property. It is a monopoly in the lack of competition sense. This is especially true for patents which much more rarely have good substitutes (since the same patent is written to cover them too), but is often the case with copyright as well, as with Microsoft. "Intellectual property" is basically worthless if there are many perfect substitutes because it's non-rivalrous. With real property increasing market share inherently requires increasing capital expenditures. A landlord willing to engage in aggressive price competition can't instantly saturate the market by providing 10,000 units to 10,000 tenants when they only own 10. If LibreOffice was a perfect substitute for MS Office then they could do exactly that.
This is why in markets like movies and music where there is good substitution possible, the markets tend toward cartels, because otherwise they would be extremely low margin commodity markets. Which is why those companies hate the internet -- it's interfering with their ability to hold the cartel together by reducing their control over distribution channels.
I can't respond to your other comment because it's flagged, so I'll respond here. I think most people don't mind pedants. The comment got a handful of upvotes, so clearly on the whole the addition was appreciated.
It's absolutely possible to be a jerk about correcting someone, but a simple dispassionate "I think you meant X instead of Y" can be helpful.
This platform actively discourages downvoting, so a couple people out of hundreds or thousands of viewers deciding to upvote you doesn't mean that the addition was appreciated.
I thought you meant exactly what you said, and I meant exactly what I said, passion and all. Regardless of the community sanctions, I still mean it.
