Slashdot Mirror
Letting The Market Choose Decent Broadband
An Anonymous Coward pointed out this piece on the regulation (and more to the point deregulation) of broadband Internet service. The article takes the viewpoint that solutions possible by relying on "the human spirit of innovation and creativity" are a better antidote than most of the broadband reforms so far proposed by politicians on behalf of lobbying groups. The author takes a stance some people may consider unrealistically optimistic, but makes some good points about the effects of arbitary deregulation.
Long distance rates took years longer to drop than they should have, local service is getting progressively more expensive, and cable (as in TV) just generally stinks. Broadband connections however... you'd have to pay me about 4x what I'm making here to move to the US.
While this goes against everything I believe in, I'll still say it again and again and again: sometimes, LESS choice can mean BETTER service. Of course, this assumes that your #1 priority is your bandwidth. Like me :)
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
This piece pretty much ignores the fact that in most states DSL services were already pretty much unregulated which is what allowed the babybells to run roughshod over Covad, Northpoint and Rhythms. There is simply no consumer recourse for being hosed over by the telco on data services once you cross into the realm of the unregulated services. Sticking to T1s and ISDN at least holds things in the realm of tariffed and therefore state regulated services. This has to date been the only reason that these services haven't been totally consumed by the telcos as DSL has been.
The consumer has already spoken in the marketplace only to find their DSL providers driven into bankruptcy at least in part due to predatory practices by the telcos. Predatory monopolies are bad, mkay.
Only two things will prevent a monopoly and create the kind of free market that will actually evolve towards providing better services:
1) The network is publically administered, giving everyone an
equal opportunity to sell services using it (I think ALL utility
networks should have a public base).
2) Every provider has their own network
There isn't any other way. We made a half-hearted stab at #1, requiring telcos to sell use of their networks to those who wanted to start up, but things haven't been administered fairly enough to bring about the desired results. What the market is sortof lurching towards is #2 -- a cable network, perhaps a few wireless networks, and phone wires.
So our friend is right in the sense that the free market will eventually come up with alternatives down the line of #2. I'm not sure about his treatment of the phone lines. Arguing that the local phone cos have exclusive property rights to the phone networks falls somewhere between semi-reasonable and dubious. For one thing, the networks fly
over or run through public lands and private lands not owned by the phone company. For another, the concept of property is given out by the people/law/government/social contract/shared fiction that we all agree is good and useful to live by in general... but we also have a history of regulating anything that becomes a public utility. With good reason.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
That's an interesting idea.... would municipalities then connect into the telco backbones? Or would the county create its own backbone(s), and those would connect to the state backbone(s), and then to nationwide backbones.....
The other problem.... I think in general that having public networks for ANY vital utility (and then letting lots of companies compete to provide services via that network) is a wise thing. I'm just not sure how the networks get built in the first place... I am a little worried about private expertise vs. public expertise in such things. Then again, cities do it with sewers....
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
I'm convinced that this is the ideal solution. No company should be allowed to own critical infrastructure. Only the people should be able to dictate what services they want hooked up to their network.
...ISPs stop bundling services that people don't want don't need to offset higher costs.
If I want a webhost, then I can contract for the best webhosting provider. My ISP shouldn't matter. Right now I have four, count them four, webspaces that I am basically being taxed for by my various ISPs, but would never dare use because I have zero faith in their reliability. I'm paying for news servers that have speed-limited connections and don't carry any binaries groups. I'm paying for seven e-mail accounts that i have to throw away if I ever change ISPs, get filled with spam on a regular basis, and are POP3 only.
Why is my $40/50 going towards crap like this? I don't want any of it. I understand that the ISP is a cutthroat business but to me it still constitutes illegal bundling of services.
I want a basic IP dialtone. I think it should be provided as infrastructure by local government. It makes no sense to have four providers of high speed internet service running four lines to every neighborhood when for the same piece the city could run fiber and then lease it to any ISP that wanted to offer service. I am willing to see my taxes go towards that.
As far as webhosting/e-mail/etc I will run those myself. For anything I lack the experience to run, I'll sign up on my own. Everything is a la carte, that is the best way to foster competition and a healthy selection of services in a market where everyone pays based on their actual use of shared resources.
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
"The best way to foster this type of innovation is to get the government out and let the free market work its magic."
... the free market and its magic. Now we have an OS that costs more than a new hard drive. I happen to get my dsl here in the states from a baby bell (bellsouth), because they make it 'easy' for you to get it from them, and hard to get it from their competitors. The result - cheap service, horrible support (i refuse to legitimize it by using the word technical, because they are about as technical as my grandmother, who is afraid of email), lots of gratuitous outages, no static ip, and lots of technical errors (I am going to change over, which, again, bs makes overly complex and difficult). My point is that when a single powerful entity that is funded from another source (in this case telephone revenue) where they have a stranglehold on the transportation medium, the free market fails. The service does not get better through competition.
Well look at what happened in the OS market with microsoft
-CrackElf
"Blake is an idealist, Jenna. He cannot afford to think." - Kerr Avon, Star One, Blakes 7
Does anyone else find it sadly amusing that the world's biggest monopolist is whining about the limiting effects about other big monopolies? However the fact that Bill Gates is finally admitting that monopolies do indeed hinder the high-tech economy is a step in the right direction. :)
But guess what? Now that the Baby Bells have nearly killed all their DSL competition, and raised their rates, they are now targetting the independent ISPs! "ISPs in California are accusing SBC Communications of trying to run them out of the broadband business." See this article at techtv.com.
So the ISP's are next, and they may go down just like the CLEC's did. Unless the Justice Department steps in and breaks up the Baby Bell monopolies. Knowing how long this takes, it makes me wonder if the independent ISPs will survive.
Then Later...
And thats when the strong animals become huge multinational monopolistic corporations...
Anonymous posts are filtered.
If anything I fully expect my DSL to cost nearly $60 a month within 2 years.
So what?
Is it really that horrible a thought that we might all have to pay 1/16th of the cost of a T1 for T1 speeds?
Everybody wants legislators to impose restrictions on the behavior of other people that they wouldn't tolerate if imposed on themselves.
If it cost you $2 in materials and time to bake a pie, and you held a pie sale, would you tolerate the government requiring you to charge no more than $2.25 for the pie?
It's not like broadband is a right or a necessity; it's a luxury, and one that's expensive to provide. But we're all demanding better service and lower prices. High speed, good service, low price; pick at most two, folks, you can't have all three.
And since the DSL marketplace is precisely the sort of marketplace that is manipulated by politicians and hurge multinational monopolistic corporations, what say you now?
The free market is great for the telcos -- they get to violate the law and screw the consumer, paying piddling fines along the way, until all their competition is crushed and we are forced back into their arms. Yup, just the way I like my free market to operate!
My solution? Not sure. How about fines with bite for a start so that when telcos break the law in their thuggish manner they get discouraged from doing it a second time by the fine?
________________
Private Essayist
The current US DSL regulatory structure sucks for a number of reasons. But they're not the ones that sophomore mentioned.
By the way, there is no money is residential phone service. Hence, no competition, but there is some competition for business phone service (local and long distance).
Take all of the wires in the street, and all of the telco switch facilities and give them back to the people. Make the whole infrastructure of monopoly regulated telcos belong to the people who have paid for them. They are too valuable a resource to allow to remain in the hands of a few unscrupulous companies any longer. These companies were paid a GUARANTEED profit for decades. They actually made more money because they over-built their systems. Since we already paid for it, it is righfully ours.
A cool idea! I'm all for keeping government out of our lives, but, there are times when it's necessary. We own most of the roads, most of the water and sewage distribution and treatment facilities in the U.S., why not information distribution? Look at the Interstate highway System. That was a long-term project designed to enhance our infrastructure. This sounds pretty close, if not identical, to the digital information distribution troubles we're having now. A far-sighted approach to wider bandwidth distribution to the masses might be something that the government needs to get in on.
- Bill
Is it really that horrible a thought that we might all have to pay 1/16th of the cost of a T1 for T1 speeds?
It is when there is no justified reason for doing so other than to prevent T1 sales from being destroyed by a cheaper alternative. DSL prices don't have to be so high, they're only high because the telephones are a local monopoly and don't want the more profitable T1 sales to be hurt.
I'm amazed that /. wastes its front page space pointing to junk like this. It's just some undergraduate practicing his P.R. flak skills by rewriting some tired Bell company propaganda, washed liberally with conservative ideology.
But where's the free market when the Bells (and ohter ILECs) were granted their monopolies, which prevented anybody else, until 1996, from putting in competing facilities at all?
But where's the free market for "innovation" when the "wireless" options cited by the college kid author are, indeed, virtually nonexistent, under a government spectrum policy (remember, the airwaves are REGULATED) that is now aimed at maximizing license auction revenues? That results in high cost-per-bit cellular clones and ever-more-concentrated commercial broadcast groups. Wireless unlicensed options are very limited, by design. Satellite is limited by both spectrum availablity and the speed of light -- "innovation" isn't going to change the value of c.
Where's the free market when an incumbent monopolist is allowed to use their monopoly power (the stuff John D Rockefeller was notorious for) to crush any competition? Where's the free market when the Bell companies use every trick in the book to prevent living up to their legal obligations?
There are, of course, two different views of "free market". One is that the government shouldn't interfere with monopolies. The other is that the government has to limit monopoly power in order to let market forces work. Clearly the undergrad author is in the former camp, the "let's bend over and let the monopolies rule us" camp.
I tried to get DSL, from the local baby bell even, for months. They never came out and told me "you are just too far from the CO". It was always, "we need to send a technician out, to see if there are any problems with your line. You'll need to be at home, in case you need to unplug phones." Finally, I had to go to DSL Reports to get the real scoop - I was borderline, and probably wouldn't like it if I got it.
So, I decided to try cable. The NEXT DAY they were at my house installing it, ignoring their own contract to install it in an inside wall, going through the attic. This was a snow day too, that many decided was too bad to go into work. I've had two outages since then, and I'm a very happy customer. That's Cox Cable of Tulsa, BTW.
I can see what they are doing, though. The Bell is dragging it's feet, while Cox is agressivly upgrading it's equipment, partially with Cable Modem subscriber's money. Soon, they will be the only game in town, and then, if they can do it, they'll offer phone over cable for a similar rate. If it was cheaper, I may have to go that way, or take the plunge, drop my land line altogether, and get a cell phone.
And that's why I'm a suppporter of deregulation - not because I think the slow-as-molassas Bell will suddenly pull themselves into the 21st Century, but because the evil merging cable companies should get a shot at the telephone market in a few years. Now THAT would be some true competition.
Well, no, your history is wrong. Perhaps you're so young that you're confusing Canada with Cuba?
Canadian telephone service wasn't a Crown Corporation (like, say, British Telecom's forebears). Bell Canada was once affiliated with AT&T, though spun off some decades ago. Several western provinces owned their own telcos. And some mom'n'pop independents still exist in parts of ON and QC.
Broadband's easier in Canada in part because there's less sprawl. It's a big country but there's a clear city/country break. ADSL doesn't work more than around 15,000 wire feet from the DSLAM (in the CO). Canada's population is largely clustered in cities and towns; large-lot-zoned suburbs (which create long loops) don't rule as they do in much of the USA. So average loop lengths are under control, and you can reach half of the country's population within reasonable range of a hundred COs or so.
Monopolies don't help. Unregulated monopolies really don't help!
How long does it take PacHell to setup DSL as opposed to another company, that must wait on PacHell? Or, @home blocking port 80 because some people are stupid enough to run Windows servers, but not unblocking.
Since the wires are already in place, the playing field is not level.
Fight Spammers!
It works both ways.
The local paper ran an article showing that BellSouth changed their charge for a dsl line to ISPs to $33.00. This was done so as to "standardize our rate plan" or some other hogwash.
This means that my $49.00 a month DSL is most likely never to go down, as my ISP makes $16.00 over the cost of leasing the DSL line from BellSouth. If anything I fully expect my DSL to cost nearly $60 a month within 2 years.
Until their is a 2-way BB solution that does not require telco cooperation we are going to get jacked.
As far as cable goes, hey, more power to them, while they are available in my local area I can only hope it keeps BellSouth and my ISP from upping my rates.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Nowadays, everything beyond the local loop has been opened up to competition, and I'm enjoying much cheaper phone bills thanks to NTL/Cable&Wireless, while BT is acting worse than ever (over priced, poor quality service [it took them a week to un-block calls thru Cable & Wireless from my phone line after they blocked it without any warning]) - acting with all the worst points of it's old days, none of the better points, and simply grasping desperately at any immediate profit.
And last I heard they were in about £30 billion debt. They don't seem to know how to compete, as though the management can't get out of the monopoly mind-set. And, IMHO, that's why BT sucks.
DSL like its ISDN ancestor are simply bullshit smokescreens that Bells pretend to offer so that they can claim unfair advantage of OTHERS in order to get rate protection. Don't you get it? Bells have no serious intention of offering broadband because they make too much money from low bandwidth analog phone lines. If they dick around for a 10 years or so putting up some fake DSL then they can claim that the reason it's all so hosed is because of the evil CLECs, ILX's and cable companies getting some bogus unfair advantage. Ergo the Bells, since they are the corporate underwriters of many Congresspersons, get to pressure their legislative suppliers with better rates and terms.
Once a company becomes a monopoly, they use their power to wipe out the playing field. They do this by failing to provide services to small competitors, or by giving away free products that competitors are charging money for. They know this is anti-competitive when the perform these actions. They know that the end result could be litigation and end in regulation. But the decisions are made, knowing full well that regulation would come only after a couple years in the courts. In the mean time, the monopoly is flourishing, the execs are making a fortune by patting themselves on the backs with bonuses, and if it comes down to being dragged into court and it looks as though the money may stop rolling in, the execs resign. The people that made the decisions got rich, and they're going to keep the money, so what do they care?
The only way to stop this kind of behavior is to provide a fast way of monopolistic evaluation and possible regulation. If the execs knew that they wouldn't have time to screw everybody over for their own personal benefit, then they most likely wouldn't. Personally, I'd like to see regulation over any behavior involving a monopoly. A government official that works onsite, that can immediately ask the question "Why's it taking so long to respond to your competitors request", would be a good thing.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be right.
Add to that rumours and allegations of stuff like BT giving it's own (not particularly big) ISP the lion's share of DSL connections while the two biggest ISPs in the country get a pathetic fraction of the broadband lines (AOL and Freeserve), and I guess a lot of people are going to be waiting a long time for broadband on this side of the Atlantic too. And seeing as I live in a fairly rural area (as rural as anywhere in the West Yorkshire conurbation gets anyway), I guess I'm not going to see any high speeds at a reasonable price for my home machine for several months yet.
But, in the end, I don't see any other way - regulation won't work. The unionized telco workers with mgmt blessing delay DSL orders for CLECs into oblivion - hell, even if you get DSL FORM the telco it can take weeks and tons of hassles - it shouldn't be this complex. No regulation will change this. Unfortunately, we are unlikely to ever see serious DSL competition - same thing applies to cable modems. The only reason cable modems blew ahead of DSL is the cable companies planned their deployment and save for network bottlenecks which got worked out, they've executed. The telcos are still driving blind.
As much as I hate monopolies (*cough*Micro$oft*cough*), in this case I doubt there are other feasible options. Competing techs (Satellite, wireless, etc) are to immature and cost too much.
Thie ONLY saving grace is cross technology competition. The only thing keeping cable modem prices down is DSL - If DLS disappears, all you cable modem user can rest assured your rates will go up FASTER than your normal cable bill - count on it. But with DSL out there, its a threat.
DSL is to cable modems what satellite is to cable TV - it provides enough competition to keep the cable prices somewhat lower. Without Satellite TV competition, cable prices would be much higher because they are still a monopoly. Its amazing to think that combined, Echostar and DirectTV would be on par with AT&T in terms of the # of customers for 'cable' service. Like #2 nationwide.
So he's right, regulation probably won't work, but if we do give the telcos free reign over DSL, they better not screw it up or we'll all be stuck with RoadRUnner paying whatever AOL wants to charge!
Personally, I love my DSL connection - offered by a Mom & Pop phone company. Prompt service, installs happen quicklyt, upgrades are a phone call away - love it. :)
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
Obviously you can't compare to Canada, because they don't have the evil Verizon killing off the competition.
Verizon's favorite four-letter word
Regulation, deragulation, whatever... All I know is my DSL was unreliable, and my cable service while faster, is bogged down with Code Red infected Windows boxes.
:)
I think I'm going to start the first Aldus Lamp internet. Perhaps with a redundant semiphore backbone.
Yeah... I'll be rich
StrategyTalk.com, PC Game Forums
As Cringley said a few months ago, the bells got the advantage of offering long distance in their region if they opened up their lines for broadband. Given the drop in long distance prices, the bells have no incentive to open their lines to competition.
Having a fully open market would be a nice idea, but that's just it - an idea. The Bells have no incentive to open their lines, thus all the DSL companies fall flat on their face (with a bit of help from the Bells) and the Bells can then offer their DSL service. The Bells own the wires, the Bells ran the wires, the Bells can do whatever they want with them. If you want anything different, you either have to buy service from the Bells, which is happening now and obviously failing, or regulate the Bells and force them to open their lines.
I'm within 3 miles of one oh the high-tech centers of the universe - rt 128 in boston. I am about 3 miles (officially, 18k feet) from the CO, thus DSL will not be available. Verizon probably won't be building a new CO to get me DSL service. I'm stuck with the "name of the month" cable service that used to be MediaOne, then AT&T, now AT&T Broadband, soon to be ??. Remind me how deregulation will change my situation...
that the government should get more involved with the cable industry. Where I live you can only get cable access for $60 with out another cable subscription. I think the market needs a little competition to drive that price down. That's where the government actually forces time warner to open it's cable networks to other ISPs. DSL is non-existent here for whatever reason, so AOL/Timewarner has a monopoly on this market. Personally, I think it stinks.
Make it such that the companies that own the COs and the last mile, and parents/subsideraries thereof, cannot offer the consumer any services and are only there to lease the use of their lines to phone, data, or other potental companies. I'd further extend it to cable lines where that is appropriate.
This would require the bells to split off a company to manage those last miles, and they would never be able to merge it back in the future. But this would also prevent a company like Covad (if they had the cash) to buy the last mile out and reverse the tables in order to screw the telcos. Including the cable lines and any future 'electronic transfer lines' that may come about in the future would also possibly open the door for more competition in the cable industry.
Of course, this isn't an overnight thing, and there must be some initial regulation as such that the cost of the 'extra' company beyond the telcos does not impact the fees that consumers already pay. I'm sure the baby bells would whine as well, since that last mile is their current money maker. But this would force a level playing field in that anyone wanting to offer consumer services would not have to worry about ownership of the last mile.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST: