Property Rights vs. Parasitism

The Cato Institute has recently published "What's Yours Is Mine: Open Access and the Rise of Infrastructure Socialism" By Adam Thierer and Clyde Wayne Crews Jr. which covers the hugely important issue of forced open access. Many classic examples of government failure under the charade of addressing imagined market failure.

Check out the introduction to the book. An excerpt:

To create and preserve the best preconditions for wealth creation and innovation in the economy, it is more sensible to regard networks as private property rather than public-utility-like vessels that should be subject to common carrier–style regulations. Unfortunately, those lobbying for open access, whatever the industry sector, want to hitch an uninvited ride on another’s property rather than construct their own or make a voluntary business deal for access. That impulse is incompatible with the aims of the network owner, and incompatible with the emergence of future networks. There can be no stable regulatory resolutions of such fundamental crosspurposes.

Continued embrace of access regulation threatens to turn Internet and other network-related businesses into lazy public utilities, neutralizing the natural competitive impulse of firms to devise alternative business models and rival networks capable of displacing an entrenched incumbent....