Well, yeah, necessarily. Where I lived the service got worse.
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 <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> 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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Scott Reed
Owner
NewWays Networking, LLC
Wireless Networking
Network Design, Installation and Administration
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www.nwwnet.net
(765) 855-1060
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