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Re: Net neutrality and please wait in the lobby
The key phrase is "a government-managed regulatory habitat". Maybe what is needed is more legislation, not less. And not controls over what the Telcos and cable companies do with net neutrality but controls to force them to open up their monopoly to competing 3rd parties. eg - Force them to sell wholesale bandwidth to 3rd party ISPs - Force them to sell space in their switching centres to 3rd party ISPs to unbundle the local loop. When direct competitors are selling net neutral broadband, how will the Telcos be able to offer hobbled broadband? The problem here is a common one to all utilities that have a monopoly hold over a single connection on the last mile. Phones, electricity, gas, water, sewage, cable TV, etc. The government has to control this for the common good. But the government can do this by granting a monopoly with controls or by creating an artificial market with competition. If they do the second, then they have to fine tune it to reflect changes in technology and possibilities. If they don't, it just falls back into the first approach. So we have the absurd situation of AT&T being broken up into the Baby Bells only for them to then merge back into a new "AT&T". Before calling for Net Neutrality legislation take a long hard look at the UK experience and what the UK has done with BT. It's not perfect, but it almost works. BT had a similar government managed monopoly to the US Telcos. They've been forced to sell wholesale broadband and LLU. Now we have a genuinely competitive market that is forcing up broadband functionality and forcing down broadband cost. And finally, the Cable companies have had it easy for too long. It's now time to treat them the same as Telcos. They got lots of tax credits for laying cable. It's now time to treat that cable as an unfortunate monopoly over a last mile and force them to open it up to 3rd parties. There are responses to this message:
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