Kind of crazy that Vietnam can provide better Internet service to their citizens than the US. Not to disparage Vietnam in any way, but you’d think a country with the largest economy in human history would be able to keep up.
Well, usually competition creates more efficient prices. So I guess somehow your telecoms companies are using strategies to avoid competing somehow.
On our end, we still have quite some parts of the economy that are planned. For example, I applied for my business license according to a particular 5-year plan, and there are only certain areas of the economy I’m allowed to participate in. I can’t just one day pick up and decide that I’m going to start a butter factory or something.
The best Internet provider is literally the Army, but they weren’t granted a monopoly. The post office and three or four other major providers exist in every city. So there’s actually quite a healthy competition for customers, it seems this too was planned for. Things don’t always work out this well, but at least for Internet it worked out pretty great.
As an aside, back when there wasn’t enough money to fund State organs, they would sometimes be granted profitable businesses to stay afloat. Some bits of this are left – you can stay at a beach hotel run by the police department in at least one city. It always seemed to me a smart way to get the country out of a bad situation. This is why the Army or the Post Office are licensed to to a bunch of profitable consumer services.
