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Verizon's Solution to Terrorism: Eliminate Verizon Competitors
The New York Times has an article about Verizon lobbying for rate increases and to remove all requirements that Verizon provide telecom services to competitors, claiming that being a large, sluggish monopoly is somehow advantageous in responding to disasters, although Verizon hasn't managed to restore phone and data service in large areas of Manhattan yet. In a related story, an association of small ISPs has surveyed its members and come to the revelation that the Bells are stifling competition.
Get cable. Sounds like in your area its cheaper and more powerful. Why even bother with Verizon? I have them in my area and picked cable instead of their poor DSL.
This is not a troll fighting that cable is better than DSL. I support cable since its an alternative and forces the phone companies into having to compete which, in the long run, should allow for cheaper DSL and better service.
If you have an alternative than take it.
As for Verizon using the 9-11 terror attack as an excuse to stiffle competition: what a bunch of B.S. Greedy companies will use anything to get ahead. Microsoft was all behind calling computer viruses terrorist activity just to try to avoid fixing the problems they were having. Lord forbid they spend more time making their products more secure!
Phone lines running to your house are natural monopolies. Phone companies providing services and billing you for your calls are not. Before making any regulation, make a distinction between the two. The phone lines and dial tone can be provided best either by a single company that's heavily regulated, or by a municipal line-rental company (think Tacoma's municipal cable). The service and billing of calls, however, is in no way a natural monopoly, and eliminating choice in this will not help anyone.
Another interesting thought, though - phoneline-providing companies are not completely natural monopolies. I have AT&T Broadband for my local phone company, which means that my phone service comes over cable lines, which I'd have running to my house anyway; so if Verizon didn't have any competition in local phone that used its lines, or if there were no local phone lines at all, I could still have AT&T.
You're forgetting the fact that Verizon didn't get where it is any more naturally than Microsoft has. It is one of the Bells, you know, the original case study for why monopolies should be broken up? And it just recombined with a long distance carrier to expand its still-extant monopoly vertically.
Do you have a
This can in a way even be extended to file formats, protocols and even API's but that would cripple development (so there should be legislation that all file formats, protocols and API's have to be open:)).
Anyway...we don't live in utopia, so don't bother...
0x or or snor perron?!
This does not to me seem possible.
Now I am no expert on the history of utilities in the U.S. (maybe someone with a Ph.D. can shed some light on this), but it seems to me that many people seem to forget that Verizon and other utilities have the advantage of huge amounts of existing infrastructure. (In fact, "Verizon" didn't even install a lot of it -- they inherited it from AT&T in the breakup.) Not only that, but this infrastructure was installed with the aid of and through countless special arrangements with local and larger governments (e.g. the U.S. Federal Government's Rural Electrification Act of 1936).
These governments realized long ago that it was in their best interest to aid utilities in building public infrastucture, whether through loan guarantees, municipal franchises, or other means. Although private firms played a much larger role in the U.S. than they did elsewhere, the utilities' monopolies are nevertheless to some degree government-granted.
While one might suggest that governments simply give the same aid to competing utilities in running another set of lines/pipes to every consumer, that is not only a very wasteful suggestion, but also one that ignores the fact that times have changed and it's no longer so easy to install the infrastructure. (I certainly don't want the streets torn up any more than they have to be.)
It is so unreasonable, then, that we ask these utilities to provide other companies access to the infrastructure that we helped them put into place? (...without dragging their feet and making every install from a competitor take gratuitously long)
Finally, while I agree that some things, like the maintenance of the two copper wires that run from my apartment building to the CO, lend themselves well to natural monopolies, it's not clear that all the other things that Verizon tries to do (Internet access, long distance service) should fall under the same umbrella.
The free market is a great ideal, and I'm all for it, but there are some circumstances where practical concerns make it unattainable and outside interference is required to prevent abuses. Pretending those practical concerns don't exist does not make them go away.
Editorial: An article in a publication expressing the opinion of its editors or publishers.
Slash is an editorial web log. Repeat this to yourself over and over: "Despite all claims to the contrary, Slash is an editorial web log. Slash is slanted toward what its readers want to see and believe. Slash is not a news site."
Your qualifying clause in the middle there is, of course, the key to the whole thing.
You may perhaps be forgetting that the telecommunications industry was ostensibly deregulated around 1996. That was the huge omnibus Federal legislation that included, among other things, the Communications Decency Act. It was touted as being a massive win for consumers as competition would emerge for all services, driving prices down, and help spur the development of new services. "Your cable company and phone company will compete with each other! Prices will fall! What could possibly go wrong?"
What went wrong is that the telecomm companies started merging. Before "deregulation," this was prohibited. Now, rather than engage in the messy and uncertain business of actually competing with each other, they just became the same company.
Now, let's say you're an ILEC. Someone walks up to you asking for a high-bandwidth digital connection. Naturally, you're going to steer them toward your T1 and T3 offerings which are pure profit for you. "But that's ridiculously expensive!" you protest. "Tough sh!t, where else ya gonna go?" they reply.
The ILECs didn't start offering DSL until the CLECs, like Northpoint and Covad, did it first. xDSL service from the CLECs continues to suck because... Well, why aren't you buying a T1?
Kuro5hin is currently down, or I'd point you to a most excellent article there explaining why this happened. Basically, the deregulation plan in CA was completely botched. They made the power delivery company (PG&E) buy power in the most expensive manner possible, then imposed consumer price caps, disallowing them from passing on those costs to consumers.
However, it should be noted that PG&E used to be both power generation and transmission (the plants and the wires). After deregulation, PG&E split into a power generation arm and a transmission arm, both wholly owned (but separate) subsidiaries of a parent company. So while the transmission arm was going $5 billion into debt paying for power, much of that money was being paid to the power generation arm, which reported record profits. When asked, "Why aren't you cross-captializing?" the parent company had no coherent reponse. There were also other little shenanigans going on, such as power plants taken offline, ostensibly for maintenance, to make power scarce and drive the prices up. And don't ask what happened to the State of California's budget surplus.
So, yes, natural monopolies are fine, iff (if and only if) they are well-regulated.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Everyone and their cousin seems to be using the tragic events of September 11th as a way to push their laws, change their polices, etc. For example, I've noticed that movie theaters make a big deal about you bringing in bags. Is Osama bin Laden going to come to a tiny movie theater in the middle of nowhere? I doubt it. Is it going to make it harder for people to bring in their own food and put more money in the pockets of the movie theater? Yup.
I assume I don't need to mention all of the insane laws that have been passed to give the government more power to eavesdrop on inoccent people ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H spot terrorists. Nor do I need to mention that more than 1,000 Muslims are in jail on no real charges at all, but the government seem to think that being Muslim means that they must be connected... I'm not saying that they don't have some possible terrorists, but, umm... I have my doubts that there were 1,000 people involved. I'd rather see a potential terrorist go free than a perfectly innocent person rot away in jail only because he's from the Middle East.
My intent isn't to bash the government, but merely to comment on how sick and disgusted I am by all the people profitting from the attack.
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suwain_2
Michael, please refrain from pushing your political views on others through your position as a slashdot editor.
Yes, please, if you wish to editorialize, become an edito... oh wait.
I mean, you can't be so opinonated when you are working for a respectable news service as opposed to a narrow interest-group related news-gathering site... er, wait...
I mean, you have a priveleged voice as editor, it's not like I can just post a comment and disagr... er, um...
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
no, natural monopolies are not fine. The point about natural monopolies from econ 101 is that they are inevitable (because economies of scale make the biggest producer the cheapest), and therefore they require regulation for any hope that the market price will be close to marginal cost. But that regulation is guaranteed to be imperfect (political rather than economic) and somewhat static or at least "behind" and is no substitute for actual competition.
Reading straight from my Microeconomics textbook, "A monopoly is a firm in an industry where the entrance of competing firms is blocked."
From the article:
In Washington, Verizon lobbyists have asked federal regulators to make it more difficult for competitors to lease space on its network, arguing that its success in restoring phone service in Lower Manhattan proves that only a big company could handle maintenance, recovery and security in the wake of such a disaster.
Looks pretty cut and dry to me.
sig?