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CA Utility Commission to Regulate DSL
mgrimes writes "According to this story on Internet.com, the California Public Utilities Commission has ruled that it has the authority to regulate DSL-based Internet services in addition to the FCC. Could be a good step in creating more competition in the broadband market... but then again given the PUC's track record, maybe we're all in for rolling DSL blackouts."
I'm sorry, but as benevolent as the state gov't thinks it is, i fear bad times are ahead, propping up current regional monopolies with subsidies.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
Normally I'm not a fan of government regulation.
But with current spotty status of DSL, I wonder sometimes if the FCC is really doing a good job here.
Yeah, CA screwed up on electricity, but my best guess is there is so much egg on their faces that the UC is going to go all out to make sure something like this worse.
Either that or it will fail miserably. If I were in CA, I'd have a dialup account for a backup...just in case.
The Internet is generally stupid
"the California Public Utilities Commission has ruled that it has the authority to regulate DSL-based Internet services in addition to the FCC."
Doesn't this sound like "I give myself the right to hit you" or "I give my company the right to regulate what car you drive"
Who gave them the authority to rule over this in any way?
Does the child say wether he or his parents get to set his bedtime?
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
A nice story.
I find it interesting that the libertarian ethos pervasive on Slashdot prevents people from realizing how powerful govt CAN be when done right, and how much regulation has contributed to the structure of the Net as it is today.
Lest we forget, it took the FCC prying open AT&T's monopoly (regulating it into being an "open-ended" instead of "closed" network) that fostered the intense competition in data-communications service provision that lowered data-transmission costs to the point where network growth became feasible. Lest we forget, before the FCC stepped in it was illegal to connect non-AT&T devices to the network.
Frankly. I'd like them more proactive in their procompetitive policies. It would be nice to see them do the same thing with the Microsoft API, for instance, so third-party developers aren't hitched to paying Microsoft simply to get the OS to function as promised.
Loretta Lynch, honcho of the California Public Utilities Commission, worked night and day in defense of the electrical and natural gas consumers of California while the forces of "laissez-faire" were screwing everyone. During the crisis, I read everything I could find anywhere about the pending legislation, the regulatory actions, spot market prices, plans for plants, environmental regulations, homebrew power regulations/incentives/products/services and even the lawsuit brought by the CPUC itself against the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for being lax on crooked corporations--most notably Enron. Need I say more? Yep.
I live in the Republican-dominated state of South Dakota. What do these sincerely conservative people want? A regulated monopoly. What do we get? Power for about a penny or two per kilowatt-hour wholesale year round with nary a failure even with our horrible weather. When the lines go down, laissez-faire does not provide us with understaffed, undertrained, low morale linemen. The lights go on again pronto, and people do not get killed due to "cost consciousness" in the training budget. Through mandatory stable pricing, adequate capitalization, strict accountability, open records, and the mandatory glut, abundance, reasonable and stable profits, and cheap reliable power is the law. One day last summer when it was nearly 100 degrees outside, I saw no exhaust coming out of the fuel-oil-fired peaking plant as I drove by. We had juice to spare.
Ms. Lynch didn't put California into the opposite condition of South Dakota. Governor George and the "bold" legislative assembly initiative (the infamous AB 1890) illegalized long term price stability from any electric power seller to any electric power buyer in California, effectively making the Federal regulators the only regulators with significant, enforceable authority. Loretta Lynch raised a little hell a little frequently about that. Given those reckless laws on the books, Ms. Lynch and the rest of the CPUC were thrown the unpleasant duty to make rulings within a system that illegalized stability. The CPUC did its best within the insane laws there to make the system work like something that didn't lay out a red carpet for Enron to screw California. In the infamous May day of 1999, it was a CPUC-mandated scientific study that sounded the alarm about bad market conditions to come. When the crisis intensified, the State of California worked so hard for Joe Blow customer that they set up a trading floor to try to "speculate back" against Enron and its ilk with the biggest (little) army that could be afforded on short notice to man the phones and the energy-trading workstations. The fiery redhead, Ms. Lynch, kept up morale for the underpaid (by energy company litigants' standards), overworked and outgunned CPUC lawyers to take on Enron, Uncle Sam's lazier regulatory side, and anybody else who would bend the law against the ordinary customer.
Bear in mind that California is drenched in sunlight, whipped by the wind, sitting on oil and natural gas galore, and beset with few extremes in temperature (except in the desert, which is sunnier, windier, less populated, and and more predictable). For ten years "laissez-faire" indicated that no new plants should be built. Ok. Environmental and NIMBY ("Not In My Back Yard") dynamics were in play, but the CPUC is not to be blamed for bourgeois disgust with the actual production of what gets consumed. The CPUC is a consumer-protecting watchdog organization... almost as good as the esoteric little PUC in South Dakota. ;-) Only weeks before the big disaster in power prices in California, our since-deceased South Dakota PUC commissioner wrote a polite little note to the feds, saying (in effect), "Nope. We know you want us to deregulate like California, but we're just fine the way we are." The CPUC did not have that option. That commission did the very best it could in a horrible situation, and it did some good.
Just so people remember correctly, it wasn't either deregulation or regulation that got California into so much trouble with the rolling blackouts, etc. It was the combination of half-assed deregulation AND half-assed regulation combined that caused their self-imposed troubles. The state decided to deregulate most aspects of the power industry, but didn't feel like taking the consequences, so it capped what power companies could charge for the power.
Forgive me for saying so, but people in California seem to have a bad habit of wanting everything, but not wanting to pay for it in some way or another. Like requiring 15 different grades of gasoline, but then complaining about the high prices at the pump. Or griping about the poor public education facilities in the state, but then not putting up the money to fix them up (actually, squandering the funds so that a bond issue had to be floated).
DSL is not a life necessity. There are people who would benefit much more if those legislators and administrators spent their time looking into solving CA's power, housing, labor, and immigration problems. I don't feel particularly bad for either the providers of DSL service or the consumers right now. One is scamming the other, and the other is allowing themselves to be scammed. So I don't particularly think that these regulation efforts are best spent in this area. But it's their state -- maybe they can do DSL differently? Somehow, I have a bad feeling!
Apologies for the rant. It just seems that people, Californians in particular, want to fix the wrong problems. Like when the Berkeley city council votes to condemn border disputes between Myanmar and Burma, but in the meantime, the streets of their own city go to shit, so homeless people actually flock there for the fringe benefits. Or when the state has a referendum on whether to outlaw the consumption of horsemeat. I mean really, how many people does this affect? And all the while, countless others are living in poverty, right next to dot com billionaires. Oops, there I go again. Sorry. I'll stop now.
but then again given the PUC's track record, maybe we're all in for rolling DSL blackouts.
In-spite of what the television tells you, the purpose of the rolling blackouts was extortion. There was PLENTY of available electricity 'on-the-grid', but the utilities felt it was not in there (immediate & present) best interest ($$$) to deliver it to Californian citizens. Bush gave 'permission' to his Energy Cartel friends to 'crush' the Californian Government's regulations.
Wake up and smell the Plutocracy friend, the Energy Utilities got away with shutting off your power in order to sway public opinion... of course, youve probably heard of Enron and their relationship to the Bush's energy commission. The problem is that the 'market' will always decide to screw you, thats why you have a GOVERNMENT (community group) who REGULATES (codifies social agreements). Jesus.
So whenever I hear that it's the half-assed combination of regulation and deregulation that caused California's consumers' problems, I think to myself that they would have been better off never deregulating at all. Los Angeles has a municipal power company and never once had a brown-out.
"The urge to fly from modern systems, instead of moving through them to even greater, fairer things is, I think, an indi
No, what actually happened was that the power companies asked for the rate cap, in order to preserve their profits. After all, through the magic of competition, rates were sure to go down... Like most legislation today, it was basically drafted by the industry the bill was supposed to regulate.
In addition, there was the matter of a 10% rate cut, paid for by a bond measure, in order to make the deal more palatable for consumers ("Look! A rate cut! Pay no attention to the bond debt..."). We also included kickbacks to PG&E for coverage of their "stranded costs" (Translation: the expenses from investment in nuke plants which nobody wanted to buy; the companies allegedly needed cash to stay competitive; something the Libertarian pro-nuke Cato crowd often glosses over when discussing this issue...)
The other aspect of the price caps that always seems to be overlooked by the media is that customers of PG&E and SoCal Edison were for years paying artificially inflated prices so the power companies could re-coup the alleged losses from selling off most of their power generating facilities. This windfall allowed SoCal Edison to do ridiculous things like paying $millions to change the name of Anaheim Stadium to Edison International Monument to Idiotic Power Company Executives and to transfer literally $billions to Edison International, their parent company. The real joke of the whole thing is that they sold some of the power plants to their own parent, so they were allowed to re-coup "losses" that were nothing more than a transfer of property from one division to another.
The power companies happily overcharged us for years, but when prices took a turn they didn't expect, they came crying to the state to help bail them out. What they should have done was use some of those $billions of excess profits from previous years to cover their operating losses from last year. Now, thanks to the amazing negotiating skills of Governor Low-Beam, we'll be paying ridiculously high electric rates for the next 20 years.