Tim Hartrick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
|Brian, Dan,
|
|> |
|> |Because one of their competitors decides to do so, forcing them to do
|> |so as well. Absent scarcity, charging for something that has zero cost
|> |simply isn't sustainable in a competitive market.
|>
|> That's what they said about the phone companies, yet I still pay lots of monthly
|> fees for certain bit settings in the switch. I even pay for DTMF service even
|> though it costs less for the phone company to support than dial service.
|>
|
|Brian's argument would be correct if the act of moving from one ISP to
|another ISP was free of cost to the end user.
It isn't clear that even this is sufficient to make the argument correct.
First, to state the obvious, the end user would need access to more than
one ISP that could accommodate her requirements. Many home and small-business
users are lucky to have one "high speed" provider available in their service
area. Less obvious, even if there are alternative providers, they would need
to be truly independent. The hierarchical service model makes it not unlikely
that two supposedly competitive providers share an upstream provider and are
constrained by contracts with that one higher-level ISP. I haven't looked at
this in detail in a long time, but it used to be common practice to enforce
fairly anti-competitive-sounding terms with peering agreements and similar
address/routing resale contracts.
Even in the case of two large and relatively independent providers (say, a
cable company and a telco-operated DSL service to take a typical situation)
it isn't clear that the oligopoly would indeed be competition-driven. Each
provider would know that it remained in its own interest to preserve the
revenue stream from address rental charges and there would be very little
incentive to "compete." This seems to be more-or-less what happens when
you have an ILEC and one big CLEC.
In order for Brian's argument to be correct in practice, then, I think we
need (in addition to painless renumbering) a reasonable number (say, > 5)
or truly independent ISPs competing for the business of the end user in
question. I just don't see this happening for the majority of users any
time soon.
Dan Lanciani
ddl@danlan.*com
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