Re: Too big to fail...
Only if the systems in question are private. It's not really a problem if they're in public ownership.
'Too big to fail' is an issue because it means that a company ceases to be governed by the rules of the market and gets an implicit public guarantee - the tax payer will bail you out because they cannot live without you. This removes the pressure of competition, and so means that you've effectively become vulnerable to all the sins of the public sector, only it's being run for a profit so there's an upward pressure on prices that doesn't exist in publicly-run enterprises.
This isn't to say that public ownership doesn't have a whole host of problems of it's own - but 'too big to fail' doesn't really apply to government-run monopolies because they're answerable to a body which is directly selected by the customers, rather than a body which only represents the shareholders.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
