Utilities, and communications which rely on scarce distribution channels as you mention are not, and will not be truly free markets and should be regulated.. how tightly they should be regulated is up to interpretation. IMHO such utilities should not be allowed to be owned by companies that have inherent market verticals and/or conflicts of interest that do not serve the public good. Time-Warner is a prime example.
As far as outside utilities, and similar services... I feel the government's role should be to limit monopolies, not eliminate, but only so much as to allow for competition to happen. The rediculous extent of IP protectionism, specifically patents on design, algorithms and business processes are counter to that. Corporate personhood as a legal concept is against that. For that matter, corporations should probably instead have limits on unutilized/underutilized assets for a given length of time, and enforce distribution back to investors in those cases.
A free market is a market is one where upstart competition can generally succeed, and entrenched incumbents are regularly surpassed, or continually growing.
As far as outside utilities, and similar services... I feel the government's role should be to limit monopolies, not eliminate, but only so much as to allow for competition to happen. The rediculous extent of IP protectionism, specifically patents on design, algorithms and business processes are counter to that. Corporate personhood as a legal concept is against that. For that matter, corporations should probably instead have limits on unutilized/underutilized assets for a given length of time, and enforce distribution back to investors in those cases.
A free market is a market is one where upstart competition can generally succeed, and entrenched incumbents are regularly surpassed, or continually growing.