At the end of the day the government exists to serve the public interest.
I would add to that that the free market definitely does not exist to serve the public interest, as far too many fans of it tend to forget.
Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all. -- John Maynard Keynes
There are places where the free market is ideal - utilities, such as Internet service (which requires either right of way on private land or permission to transmit and receive without interference on public airwaves) is not one of them.
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.
I would add to that that the free market definitely does not exist to serve the public interest, as far too many fans of it tend to forget.
Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all. -- John Maynard Keynes
There are places where the free market is ideal - utilities, such as Internet service (which requires either right of way on private land or permission to transmit and receive without interference on public airwaves) is not one of them.