At 7/17/2011 07:22 AM, Scott Reed wrote:
Well, yeah, necessarily. Where I lived the service got worse.
I presume you mean that ironically, as a sample of one does not
indicate a general case.
Service got considerably better for my employer at the time, where I
worked in telecommunications. Competition helps. And for the first
couple of years, the still-fettered Bells tried pretty hard to do a
good job with the businesses they were given.
On 7/16/2011 10:08 PM, Fred Goldstein wrote:
At 7/16/2011 09:41 PM, Scott Reed wrote:
I also noticed that the breakup of Ma Bell degraded service in
many areas. A monopoly by market demand is not necessarily
bad. A monopoly by regulation is bad.
Well, not necessarily. Ma Bell's service was never consistent
before the breakup, but their P.R. was good.
The monopoly occurred "naturally" from the time the Bell patents
expired (1893) until the last competitors were gone in the
1930s. There were CLECs galore (called "independents" at the time,
but not the geographic-monopoly independents of later years) in the
1893-1920 era. Bell bought Pupin's patent on the loading coil in
the 1890s, which gave them a monopoly on long distance (>10 miles
or so), but local service was competitive in many
places. Independents pioneered dial; Bell was all-manual until the
1920s. However, the economics of natural monopoly are real. The
larger market share means a lower unit cost, so the big guy almost
always wins. So by 1934, when the Communications Act was passed,
the monopoly already existed; FCC and state rules simply locked it
in place (made it de jure).
The idea of TA96 was to de-monopolize. Since the natural monopoly
still exists, unbundling is a way to open the market, but the 2001
FCC turned against it and the current one remains opposed, law notwithstanding.
The public Internet only exists because the FCC in 1966 started the
Computer Inquiries, which created a bright line distinction between
carriage ("basic service") and content ("enhanced service"),
especially in 1980's Computer II. The ILECs hated that. The FCC
also rammed sharing and resale down their throats around 1976 --
before that, you couldn't lease a line between two companies unless
one of them was a licensed common carrier (e.g., Western Union, one
of Ma Bell's few authorized wholesale resellers). How could you
have an ISP without those rules? However, in 2005 the FCC revoked
the Computer Inquiry rules, in response to a Verizon request, which
is what led to the whole Network Neutrality kerfuffle.
The "no regulation" approach would most likely involve granting
ILECs full property rights on their networks, so they would have
unregulated monopolies. Who does that benefit? It's a banana
republic situation. Every civilized country regulates its
monopolies or keeps them under public ownership. Of course
property rights are themselves an artificial legal construct, so I
suppose a Somali-level approach would be that you could string
wires, but you'd need to hire warlords to guard them, and could
steal whatever your warlords were able to rassle from
competitors. Ironically, Somalia does have a competitive mobile
phone sector, since there is no government to regulate it and the
warlord armies do guard their towers, but no wireline sector to speak of.
WISPs are less dependent on wireline rules than wireline ISPs, who
are largely hurting due to malevolent FCC policies. But they still
depend on spectrum regulatory policies. which the FCC makes
consistent with the law. And many depend on wireline backhaul,
where regulation is the only thing that keeps the monopolies from
gouging worse than they do. (I've got an article in the works
about how the real digital divide is the way the ILECs have kept
the fiber dividend -- the low per-bit cost of capacity on fiber --
away from their monopoly ratepayers, even though it operates in
competitive markets.
On 7/16/2011 9:25 PM, Faisal Imtiaz wrote:
Well...again you have to go further back in history...before
telecom regulation ..it was a Ma Bell monopoly ......and without
regulation...there is a very good chance that it will again
become a Ma Bell monopoly or maybe a duopoly...
Let's not forget that...
Faisal
On Jul 16, 2011, at 9:03 PM, RickG
<<mailto:rgunder...@gmail.com>rgunder...@gmail.com> wrote:
"it is Regulation (1996 Telecom Act) that
allowed us (ISP's) to be able to go into the business of providing
internet access and other communication services"
With all due respect, it's exactly the mindset that government
"allows" us to be in business that IS the problem. Telecom Act
or no, regulation or no, there should be no question that we are
allowed to make a living the way we want to regardless.
--
Fred Goldstein k1io fgoldstein "at" ionary.com
ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.com/
+1 617 795 2701
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