Sorry, I’m not following you. We’re discussing if deregulation is always bad or not, and my point is that it can be bad in excess.

The article points to some corruption that happened at the time, which is correct, but it does not discuss anything about the benefits (or lack of it) for the end user after the deregulation.

If we could prove that if we kept excess regulation in the market as it was before, people still could have access to telecommunication as we have today, my point should be wrong. But its not the article discussion or what you’re saying now.

Notice that I’m not defending 100% deregulation, even in the Brazilian example the market is still regulated today, just way less than it was 20 years ago. If we have no data caps for residential internet around here, its because of a regulation, not companies good faith for example.

Out of curiosity I asked chatgpt to list examples similar to the Brazilian one and it listed a few:

United Kingdom - Energy Deregulation Japan - Rail Deregulation New Zealand - Telecommunications Deregulation Australia - Banking Deregulation Sweden - Postal Service Deregulation

Truth is, its really hard to prove that something “is always” good or bad, as it will need to go over all cases and prove the point one by one. Normally economic discussions are applied to a society or sector, so we could say “in the US deregulation is often bad”, which is much more fair and easy to prove.

So can you explain for this specific case how other factors influenced in a way that the deregulation was still bad for the end user?

I mean, you said that deregulation has no benefits, I just gave you an example that disagrees with your idea. It does not matter other Brazilian problems in this context, I could take any example of any place to prove my point.

In Brazil, during 1990 - 2000, telecommunications were a highly regulated market. Due to difficulties to enter the market, there was not that many companies around, and outside big cities, phones are mostly inexistent or too expensive for the average customer.

I remember that in my city (100k people) there was only one option, and in my mother’s city (5k people) there was no option.

After ~2000, the government did a big deregulation, making easier to other companies to enter in the market and do investments. A few years later, we got coverage across the entire country. For example, in 2005 my city had 5 options and my mom’s city had its first option. At this time my family finally could afford paying for a phone plan.

So yeah, excess regulation can harm markets, and deregulation can be good. Finding balance is key here.

Do you have sources on this? I did a quick research and the only thing that I found was this article that argues that Neoliberalism definition changed over time and it would be an anachronism to take how the therm is used today (for example in this post) to define what they mean at the time, and the closest definition for them would be liberals, not neoliberals anymore. Which is totally fine given the time that has passed, and specially how political definitions are hard to define without context (example on how we consider left and right nowadays and 200 years ago for example, its not the same ideas)

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/history-of-neoliberal-meaning/528276/

Important to mention that Neoliberalism is a therm not really used by people by people who defend liberty, capitalism and free market policies. It’s not something academic for example. Basically you won’t find liberals calling themselves neoliberals.

It is often used by people that does not agree with liberalism, sometimes in a pejorative way, other times to aggregate a group of heterogeneous people, and sometimes mixing different policies and aspects of modern western societies.

Citing the Wikipedia article that explains and has sources on this:

The term has multiple, competing definitions, and is often used pejoratively.[21][22] English speakers have used the term since the start of the 20th century with different meanings.[23] However, it became more prevalent in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s; it is used by scholars in a wide variety of social sciences,[24][25][26] as well as by critics,[27][28][29] to describe the transformation of society in recent decades due to market-based reforms.[30] The term is rarely used by proponents of free-market policies.[31] Some scholars reject the idea that neoliberalism is a monolithic ideology and have described the term as meaning different things to different people as neoliberalism has mutated into multiple, geopolitically distinct hybrids as it propagated around the world.[32][33][34] Neoliberalism shares many attributes with other concepts that have contested meanings, including representative democracy.[35]

Don’t be like them and generalize everything. Browsers are complex piece of software with many use cases. For mine for example Firefox works great without major issues. It might not be the case for you and that’s fine!

I think it’s more related to the language importance than it’s size. We have continental countries (Russia, Brazil, etc) that you can also drive for a week without leaving and learning English is important there.

If the world had chosen another language for communication probably US citizens would need to learn another language still.