Competition good. Monopoly bad.

Luxembourg is a good example when it comes to the consequences of an Internet market that isn’t sufficiently competitive.Suppose you want to set up a small business, with a .lu domain name, a little web site and some e-mail addresses. You can purchase an “all-inclusive” Internet access and hosting package for small businesses with the leading (almost monopoly) provider, the national P&T. The domain name is registered directly with dns-lu, though, by faxing or snail-mailing a form to them. (Change requests are to be submitted in writing as well.)Fortunately, dns-lu is relatively quick when compared to P&T. After you have set up your web hosting and initial set of e-mail addresses (by, again, faxing a form), customer service degrades: You can call an always-busy hotline. You can send e-mail which is ignored. To successfully get an additional e-mail address, though, you have to resort to fax and postal mail again. They may even react to that — after four months.