"Steven P. McNicoll" writes:
"Matthew S. Whiting" wrote

I agree that you need "perfect" competition to yield perfectly low
prices, but perfect competition rarely exists in the real world as it
requires consumers to have perfect knowledge of all alternate products
and their prices. A regional system is far from perfect, but it would
provide much more competition than exists now, but certainly far from
perfect competition.

It wouldn't provide any real competition. The users wouldn't have
a choice in providers.

And right you are. ATC has a very limited clientele and
providing 365/24 service is very expensive. Until the day
arrives when you can walk into Radio Shack or Circuit City
to select which ATC provider you want to use, there isn't
any competition in the consumer sense of the word.

I would presume that any privatizing of ATC would involve the
Feds awarding a contract or contracts to the "most qualified"
bidder having the best price.

Who (objectively) determines and quantifies the qualifications?
One can easily envision contracts being awarded to the organization
that has made the largest campaign contributions (bribes) to the
political party in power at the time.

What would be the transition process? A contractor can't just
walk in on day 1 and tell all the controllers that they're on
the street and are being replaced by a machine.

If the contractor can't instantly eliminate all the controllers,
where will qualified controllers be obtained? Who is going to
certify them as being competent to do their job?

What is the backup process in case the chosen contractor fails
to perform? Will the current controllers be kept on the payroll
as a "hot backup" in case the contractor has to be terminated?

Let's say that a contractor devises a super slick, whiz-bang
way to automate ATC. If the contractor installs the ground
equipment for this, does it depart with the contractor when
the next contract is awarded to another contractor? ATC
operations are suspended for some number of months while the
new contractor replaces all the equipment? [Instead of
"radar service terminated", we'd have "radar terminated"?]

If the super slick, whiz-bang automation comes to pass, who's
going to control the interface for the end-users? Who is
going to convince the end-users that they have to spend some
possibly large amount of money per aircraft to be compatible
with the scheme devised by the (latest) contractor? What if
the next contractor decides that the previous contractor's
scheme sucks and wants to produce something quite different?