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EBone/KPNQwest Network Shutting Down
reginald.barclay writes "As KPNQwest has filed for bankruptcy some time ago, also EBone, which they aquired some months ago, goes down the drain. Together, these two companies carried betwenn 1/3 and 1/2 of European IP Traffic (and, in the case of KPNQwest, an unknown portion of voice). Employees at Ebone were laid off last week and told to abandon their NOC. But instead of getting drunk and over with it, they occupied their former workplace. Now even their time is running out, and one of Europes oldest backbone carriers will probably be shut down today, at 1700 CET. I wonder how many of their customers (mostly ISPs and VBCs themselves) have managed to run to the competition in time. Nevertheless, I expect the routing in large parts of Europe to be very interesting (in the chinese sense, of course) over the coming weekend and early next week." Update: 06/14 18:02 GMT by M : Apparently KPNQwest's creditors have agreed to pay to keep the place going until the end of June.
The next time someone is talking on slashdot about how mergers are natural in the telecom industry, and telecom companies that lock down entire markets until they are local monopolies in some cities are Just Trying to Make a Living, and the government has no right to dictate that a telecom company be "nice" to their competitors, and there's absolutely no harm in megamerger after megamerger followed by competitors being disallowed from leasing space on the local telecom equipment..
I'm going to link this article.
And then i'm going to scream something incoherent along the lines of "BAD AYNDROID!! BAD!! BAD!! SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE BAD!! MONOCULTURE BAD!!, and then curl up in a little ball and cry because no-one really cares.
Yeah, we'll just route right around Europe. I just hope you aren't trying to talk to anyone in the hole.
The point everyone makes about routing around damage is just that, the Internet is designed to be able to route around sections that go away. But if half the ISPs in Europe are behind the routers that go away, they'll be gone. But everyone else will still be able to talk to Asia, Africa, or what ever.
I do know that just about every time I've tracerouted to a site in Europe I've seen "ebone" in the trace. I think this could be bad for a lot of people.
I think that says it all, really.
I dunno, I think there should be a government bailout of something like this.
No. No. No.
If the infrastructure is really that critical (like a country's highway system is), then the government should nationalize the backbone and make it available to competing ISPs under identical terms (i.e. actually allow competition and prevent vertical monopolies leveraged from physical monopolies over last mile cable and critical backbone links from forming).
If it isn't that important, then they should simply stand aside and let these companies go belly up, with all the consiquences that entails.
In no way should an existing, unsuccessful commercial enterprise be propped up by government: either the free market works, or there is no free market (read: monopoly), in which case the underlying structural cause of the monopoly (if any, in this case perhaps the copper, esp. if last-mile copper is involved) should be nationalized, and the market opened up so it can operate freely, with competition.
Bailouts are the worst of both possible worlds: government intervention and expenditure of public funds AND private corporate control with no public accountability (beyond their stockholders, if they happen to be traded publicly).
When Northpoint went under with no warning it sucked (we were off the net for 2 days due to that fiasco, and NSI didn't fix our DNS for 10 days), but even there a government bailout would have been wrong.
Nationalizing Ameritech's last mile of copper, so that Ameritech wouldn't be able to maliciously leverage that monopoly to drive competing DSL providers like Northpoint out of business, on the other hand, would have been a reasonable response. Unfortunately the ayndroids of the far right have managed to convince a large percentage of people that free enterprise is a panacea in all contexts and the only good governance is no governance. Nonsense, of course, as anyone can see (just try applying that logic to public highways and try to imagine the economic impact of Road Monopolies), but it is a widespread and in many respects crippling meme that has infected much of America.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I have to disagree - w/o some kind of competition, it's just not capitalism anymore, IMHO. Hmmm, I'd sure like to see Ayn Rand and Karl Marx on the Jerry Springer show ;))
Anyway, once a market gets monopolized it's all over - they have no real incentive to innovate, improve effeciency; all they have to do is get fat dumb and happy, collect extortion fees from captive customers and enjoy the good life on the golf course (cf. ATT - the phone system started out long ago as many independent small phone systems, eventually competing in long dist, etc, but by the late 60's and 70's had stagnated a very important industry, etc.) Gobbling up the competition in a free for all laissez faire capitalist system is a poor, temporary substitute for getting the real job done, redefining business plans, and ultimately doesn't benefit the consumer. Makes the current balance sheet look good tho, but is just postponing the inevitable toward an even bigger collapse later.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Although your point is a little vague, it seems to mean 'tough sh*t, consumers couldn't cough up for bandwidth.'
You're playing into a common fallacy, which is that the only reason a company can go broke is if they didn't have enough demand. Well...actually businesses go broke for many reasons. Businesses make decisions outside of demand that affect their health. Particularly in a more monopolistic situation, it is hard to argue that there's a sufficient market to distribute the risk of bad decision-making.
For example, maybe they thought the bandwidth need was going to be 50% greater than it was, and though they could accommodate 100% of the traffic profitably, they scaled their business out of reach and it came down like a heap of bricks. In that situation, the demand could have been met profitably, but bad decisions caused them to fail completely--regardless of ability to meet demand, or for customers to pay.
Wow. It's amazing how wrong you are. ATT from the60's and 70's invented UNIX, C, AWK (whence Perl), etc. And that was just in one department. They made so many amazing improvements in CS, Information Theory, etc. Basically, anything that could in some way benefit the largest company in the world.
In fact, if you look at it, most of the world's great research labs (Xerox PARC, IBM, Bell Labs) have been the result of monopolies, not start-ups.