RE: Some thoughts on natural monopolies
How did TTC get a monopoly in the first place? All of that capital raising and infrastructure building would have been noticed by other people in the economy and attracted competition well before there was 100% market penetration.
In reality when it comes to telecom markets, many of the big ones were granted monopoly rights. I still believe it could have worked out without government intervention - maybe not at the biggest scales, but still ... if one company would start with telephone lines while everyone else are using horses for message delivery, one can get quite a competitive edge. It's of course risk taking at its fines level ... one can say that people should be rewarded for taking risks, but it is harmful for the society that one company has such a big grip on the market decades later.
If TCC would be starting i.e. in City of London, expanding to Westminster and so forth ... even if another company starts in another borough of London, the TCC could gain such an upper hand that they could gradually overtake customers from the competitors or buy up the competitors, becoming the de-facto monopolist in all UK. Fully possible I think ... but it's quite hypothetical.
Microsoft, Facebook and Google are the bigger elephants in the room, internationally.
The only one of those that could be considered to be approaching a natural monopoly is Google, and we are seeing their market share shrink (although still very high).
Market domination is just a temporary phenomenon when there aren't laws and guns supporting a firm.
Facebook probably doesn't deserve the label "monopoly" - but still I think it's a major problem that "everyone" expects "everyone else" to have a Facebook account. I still haven't joined Facebook, but it's sometimes making things difficult for me, and I know people that have missed invitations to weddings and similar due to not being at Facebook.
As I've written in my post, Microsoft is losing some of the grip on the markets, but it's still pretty hard i.e. to buy a regular laptop without paying a "Microsoft tax" - and I'm regularly getting into problems both from my children, my wife, the childrens school and other instances for not providing Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office at home. Microsoft still has a pretty good grip on those things - you may argue that they don't qualify as a "monopolist company" due to the mere fact that alternatives indeed does exist, but the problem doesn't go away by arguing over definitions.