Skul, the problem with unfettered competition where only the fittest and best survive leads to a situation where unprofitable markets don't get serviced (or if they do the prices of those services make it uneconomical for the consumers). A perfect telecommunications example - I was in Tasmania last month and discovered the hard way that my mobile phone carrier (being a Vodaphone reseller) doesn't have any coverage in the Western half of Tassie (Strahan, Queenstown, Zeehan etc), only Telstra does. Now, I'm sure if Telstra were given free reign they probably wouldn't service western Tasmania and many other regional areas of Australia as well.
Whilst I agree with you about appropriating another company's infrastructure you can't really compare China and Australia. China has 1 billion+ people on a similar sized land mass to the one we have 20 odd million, plus wages are a fraction of what they are here. Therefore the cost of providing telecommunications infrastructure is much lower on a per capita basis, and it is probably far more viable to provide telecommunications services to China's Tasmania equivalents (as their western Tasmania equivalents probably still have population densities more akin to Regional NSW) than it is in Australia.
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