Breaking the Monopoly

victoriatangoman Wrote:
> If as many of us suspect, the prime rationale for creating habitats will be
> for housing the workers who are building the Solar Power Satellites, how will
> multiple habitats ever come to be?

The powersats will probably come before the habitat.

As for the consortium problem. The best solution I can see would be for
government involvment in the process. That way the various governments could
run a lot of the infrastructure charging a reasonable fee to anyone who wants
to use it. That would make it much easier for others to compete. Banning
companies from doing both mining and habitat construction could help. Also
creating ISO standards for how things are to be done (e.g. docking connectors,
data transfer, etc) would help make everything commodity and also prevent
companies that want to monopolise something from doing it. If you don't use
the standards (which should be royalty free) most people won't do business with
you. That would be a good way to stop companies from designing their own
docking connector so that only their ships can dock at their habitats if they
have a monopoly on ships and habitats.

Carl Mullin Wrote:
> Frankly I don't see ANY problem in getting the owners to share Islands with
> other companies. All they have to do is to charge rents! So many companies
> banter and shares and form alliences that this question is really a
> non-starter.

What if it's more profitable to own the only one? I mean if you have all the
infrastructure anyone who wants to do something in space has to buy from you.
You could charge anything for even a shoddy job.