This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

In a world where legacy businesses don't have to out-think, out-innovate or out-serve upstart disruptive competitors. In a world where giant power utilities and chains of automobile dealerships hide behind laws and regulations that protect them from new forms of competition.

In such a world, your good friends at The Salt Lake Tribune wouldn't have to be retrenching, rethinking and spending a whole bunch of our new owner's money trying to adapt public-service journalism and investigative watchdoggery to a brave new world of mobile platforms and fake news sites.

We'd just go to the Legislature, or the Public Service Commission, and demand that they protect us and our paper-and-ink brethren from the ravages of online news — and "news" — outfits. Because, well, because we're really important. Because we are job creators. Because we provide a valuable public service, which we might not have the means to provide much longer if that site over there keeps hijacking our traffic, not to mention those folks over yonder who have long since eaten all our classified advertising.

And, doggone it, people like us.

It's not going to happen. We don't think that way. Maybe because we're slow. Maybe because asking for government regulations to protect one news outlet from another would have huge and unsettling First Amendment implications.

Meanwhile, folks like Rocky Mountain Power and the Utah Auto Dealers Association are protected from their version of the small mammals that are evolving to bite the toes of the legacy dinosaurs.

Rocky Mountain Power is hot to change the rules so that the economic incentive for households to install rooftop solar apparatus goes up in vapor. The utility wants to be allowed to pay those people less for the excess power they provide to the grid, and to charge them more for the simple privilege of being hooked up to the grid.

And, just the other day, the Utah Supreme Court upheld the state law, and the bureaucratic interpretation of that law, which forbids electric car maker Tesla Motors from opening up its own showrooms in the state.

The law here requires that new cars be sold through independent — as in, not owned by the automaker — franchises. They may not be sold by stores that the automaker itself owns and operates — which is the preferred model for Tesla's managers.

The court did not uphold the wisdom of the state law, just its constitutionality. Those who support the status quo argue that independent dealers would be overwhelmed by any automakers' vertically integrated system, to the point of being put out of business by the new business model.

And, if that's too selfish, they also contend that independent dealers are more likely than corporate thralls to go to bat for the consumer whenever a buyer thinks they've been stuck with a lemon or is otherwise dissatisfied. (That kind of advocacy does happen. I've benefited from it myself.)

Of course, one might ask if consumers would be smart enough, for that reason among others, to choose to do business with an independent dealer over the corporate-drone outlet down the way. Smart enough that we could let the marketplace make the decision, not the law.

The Venn diagram in all of this overlaps at Warren Buffet, whose Berkshire Hathaway conglomeration owns both Rocky Mountain Power and its Nevada counterpart, NV Energy. And at Elon Musk, creator of Tesla Motors and owner of Solar City, the big rooftop solar outfit in Nevada that's been going toe-to-toe with Buffet's NV Energy in a fight that's a lot like the one we're having in Utah, but that gathers more national media attention because it's less David and Goliath than it is Old Goliath vs New Goliath.

Buffet was once considered, by a lot of folks if never by himself, a potential buyer for The Salt Lake Tribune, back when the hedge fund weasels who owned us were in the process of bleeding us white.

In the end, though, it is a very good thing that Buffet didn't buy us. Not just because most of us Tribbies are pretty darn happy with local ownership in general, and with the money, staff and personal attention that's come along with it. But because having the major news operation in a state owned by the same corporation as the biggest power monopoly in that state would be a really, really bad idea.

George Pyle, a Tribune editorial writer, once worked for the Warren Buffet-owned Buffalo News. The computers were antiquated and the carpets were filthy. But the journalism was top-flight. gpyle@sltrib.com