On 8/27/2010 9:14 PM, George Ou wrote:
...
Mr. Oliver on the other hand might acknowledge that they own it in
name, but they effectively don't. The fact is that if these companies
are given the right of way under certain terms, you can't change
that. You might be able to say that they have to lease that right of
way, but that just ends up being a tax on consumers since the
broadband providers can't absorb that hit without going out of business.
George Ou
You make very good points, George. The fact that the FCC (and local UCs)
allowed companies like Verizon to build out their fiber with an
assurance that they wouldn't have to lease them (as they had to lease
their copper) was a huge mistake. However, you are incorrect when you
state that "you can't change that." We did it with copper. When the
copper infrastructure was built out, companies that owned it did /not/
have to share it. And somewhere along the line, we wanted competition in
local phone and ISP service, so we changed that. And they didn't go out
of business. The only difference here is that one could argue the copper
infrastructure was largely already a sunk cost, long ago paid for.
I'm very much a free market capitalist except for places where
regulation is appropriate. The very concept of "changing the rules" and
forcing companies to lease their fiber seems like a bad Chavez-inspired
Venezuelan dream. But it's the situation we're in. The regulatory bodies
(state UCs and FCC) have failed us. They've screwed up. We now have a
mess. We can either decide simply to live with bad Internet -- in an age
where that's unthinkable -- or we can fix it. Where I live in
Pennsylvania, they did it with electricity in the past 10 years. They
dealt with the fact that they were "changing the game" on the electric
companies by providing them with a multi-year time period during which
they could collect "transition fees." These were essentially fees to pay
for infrastructure that a monopoly built, recognizing that it wasn't
expecting competition (and perhaps built inefficiently). Now, our
electric bills will contain two main components: generation and
transmission. Transmission will still be the regulated monopoly.
Generation is free choice open market.
