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Open Letter to FCC Chairman Powell
Adina Levin writes "An open letter to FCC chairman Michael Powell signed by internet and tech industry pioneers explains why the government shouldn't prop up the ailing telecom behemoths. Telecom companies bought expensive network technology with long bonds. That technology has been made obsolete by gear getting faster and cheaper all the time by Moore's law and Metcalfe's law. The telecom companies are asking for the equivalent of a bailout for their investments in sailing ships after the advent of steam. The way to speed the deployment of broadband to homes isn't to prop up businesses based on old technology, but to let uncompetitive businesses 'fail fast', and let new competitors play."
Doesn't their existing infrastructure, and social dependency on that infrastructure, give them a somewhat legitimate need for a bailout? If other, smaller, more efficient companies can replace everything the telecom behemoths do, then let the big boys suffer, but is that the case? Can smaller tech savvy companies do everything the large telecoms do or are we talking strictly about broadband internet?
sig.
Nahh. Privatize everything. It works.
You are trolling, aren't you. In case you don't know about it, go look up Railtrack - the UK privatised rail company that recently declared bankrupcy, leaving the UK govt with the options of a bailout of closing down the rail network. They chose the bailout. The sucessor company (Network rail) is a not-for-profit co.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Capitalism one day, Socialism the next, whatever keeps the dollars rolling in, that's what they'll ask for.
Government subsidies are bad.
Riiiight. The streets around your house will look awful funny when only 70% of your neighbours pay their road construction bills. 30% of your street will be dirt road, the rest paved?
I suppose education should be completely privatized too. That way, the only chance a child from a lower economic class has to make something of themselves will be torn away because their parents can only afford to choose two of these three alternatives: 1) feed them 2) clothe them 3) educate them.
I suppose, by your logic, that I should have to pay for my own dedicated wiring from my house to the electricity provider of my choice, right? Would we really have, like, 99% of all houses connected to the electical grid (therefore, accelerating the growth of other technologies like electrical appliances) if distribution was privatized? Would there be any incentive to have a step down station in bumsville, nowhere?
Markets work, u know?
Markets work with quite a bit of help. Do you think they'd work if we didn't have laws regulating fraud, disclosure, etc.?
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Note that the companies will go under. No-one will go around digging up the fibre and copper which are already under ground. Companies that fail will have their assets bought by someone who is not failing. Control of the last-mile will move. The companies are trying to avoid corporate failure. The reason there is an argument, at a philosophical level, is not that some companies will die, but that control of the last-mile will move to companies which have a different paradigm entirely. That is what the corporates are trying to make the government fear, not the actual economics of bankruptcy for certain specific players.
~cHrissigned by internet [...] pioneers
Who are they? Is it reasonable to call someone an "Internet pioneer" even if he or she hasn't (co-)authored an RFC carrying a three-digit number?
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Phone hacking, the next generation
The problem is that if the telephone system becomes based on the Internet, there will be catastrophic security breaches in our telephone system.This is because every node on the internet can have packets directed at it by any other node. That's the whole point of end-to-end. But that means any joker with a PC can log in to his ISP and start up h4x0r scr1pt5 to start cracking phone switches.
With the current phone system, control signaling is out of band - end users can only control the phones at each end of the connection, and cannot control the functioning of the switches in between. You can command the switches by dialing a number, but you can only route your call this way, not control the basic functioning of the switch.
To a large extent security can be maintained by keeping the telco equipment in securely locked buildings.
But the protocols used for the phone system apparently aren't designed with security in mind, so that when they are adapted to the Internet, they become gaping security holes.
Potentially someone could do some clever work and bring down a whole nation's phone system, if it were on the Internet.
The convergence of the telephone system and the Internet has already been going on for a while. It is quite common for long-distance calls to be routed over the Internet, so you get phone-to-phone VOIP without the user being aware of it.
It is also common for telcos to be ISPs, and they just use the same fiber for voice and data. It's more economical to use the same data formats and protocols for voice as well as data, so they transmit all the voice calls with the Internet Protocol.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I sincerely hope that you are joking, or playing devil's advocate. The "market economy" is a fiction, created by government contrivance. Do you really believe that it is some sort of objective truth? or that it is the ultimate expression of human desire for advancement?
The market economy has done such an excellent job in protecting the environment and promoting individual liberty. Ironically enough, the "free market" has given us the most blatent interferences in market freedom that we have seen.
This is not to say that the market is undesirable or is not an excellent allocator of (some) resources - just that is it insufficient as a complete societal model.
I want to mention that Hayek, at least in "The Road to Serfdom", does not call for an abolishment of government. He seems to acknowledge, as many of us do, a need for it. Our founding fathers did.
The problem is, combined federal, state and local government here now represents about 50% of the market place, as opposed to around 5% prior to 1910. Truly this is *the* metric that shows clearly the US is now a collectivist / socialist enterprise.
History shows (Russia, National Socialist Germany, etc..) us that such a model does not work. It is a non competitive model. At best it can limp along, but will not provide liberty, self determination, self actualization. It cannot provide *opportunity* for a middle class. "We're in a tight spot!" - Oh Brother.
The states now feel the pinch (punch) of this last fed induced mania. For some excellent data and commentary on the current state, see Michael Hodges "Grandfather Economic Report". Best, Dave
It's not just that they got caught buying the wrong equipment, the big telecoms players have specficially resisted IP over ethernet in order to keep entry costs as high as possible. The most ridiculous thing in the world is these suggestions that they had to stick with ATM and Sonet in order to cash in on the huge potential of video conferencing and video on demand and all this utter crap that only seventy year old technophobe shareholders would believe.
Compare an OC3 from a Bell -vs- an OC3 from a native ethernet provider like Cogent. These are two different worlds of cost.
But hey, let the FCC do what they will, we'll just add it to the list of criminal frauds already commited when it's time to impeach and imprison Bush and his administration.
It is far more profitable to either kill or join with your competitors, than to compete with them by offering better products at lower prices. This is why a strong government is needed to ensure a working market, based a continues struggle to provide better goods at lower prices than your compatitors.
Without such a strong government, producents will join force in guilds, who keep the market closed to outsiders, by force if necessary. This was the situation until the development of nation states with a strong King as the leader.
Unfortunately, this violates the foundation for the Libertarian belief, namely that all evil is created by government and all good come from the market. And as always when belief and reality slashes, the believers are unable to see the reality.
Of course, this isn't an excuse for the government to take up other tasks than ensuring that players on the market follow the rules.
...if some of the (hidden) corporate interest behind this goes something along the lines of:
"Please, please, don't bail out Worldcom! We all want to grab a piece of that 50% Internet backbone share for ourselves! Don't bail them out!" ?
Following the Sailing to Steam Power analogy:
Government's do not scrap entire fleets when a new technology improves over what is in existance, they strat building new ships and as the older, obsolete ships either sink, are lost in battle, or are too old to maintain they are replaced.
There is some old technology out there, and anyone seeking a bailout on that should be denied. Airlines should be denied bailouts, unless the money is used to go toward improved tech. The $100,000 switch of yesteryear can be replaced with a more relaible $25,000 switch that can handle more traffic, then that is what the money should go for -- improvements.
If their business model is failing, many airlines are in this boat only because of the lessed travel, then they need to adjust..close hubs, discontinue routes, etc. Yes, it would suck for the people that are affected, but what is to stop them from forming a local company to fill the void? It may be too expensive to run a daily flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco for a major airline using a big jet, because there are only 30 people wanting to go each day on average, but a smaller company with a 10 passenger leer could make 3 trips a day, and probably be very profitable.
Government should seek to involve itself in National Defense and Policies, and Proteciton of the Populace -- everything else should be a local matter.
Sig? What's a Sig?
To clarify what anonymousman77 said - the RBOCs are currently required to lease out DSL coloc's for the amount it costs them to deliver service.
Which sounds all fine and good, except that they're not allowed to charge for infrastructure costs. How much did it cost to upgrade the CO to DSL? To restructure wiring? To perform service upgrades? Doesn't matter, can't charge for it.
The flip side to this is that traditionally the RBOCs have used exactly these costs (and generally inflated them) to prevent competition. To put it bluntly - they fucked other companies for a decade and now they're being punished for it.
Of course, this doesn't help anyone who can't get DSL because it doesn't make economic sense for the RBOC to upgrade. Or the various telecomm supply companies who have seen their contracts evaporate because the RBOCs aren't willing to invest in infrastructure at this point.
> The primary reason most people advocate capitalism is ETHICAL, not scientific.
In what theory is capitalism ethical? Nothing in my readings has any statements about an ethical dimension.
> Health care? You have only to go to a socialist country to see how that works. They won't throw you out in the gutter, but they will make you get in line, possibly for months to remedy serious ailments such as cancer.
So what happens if I have cancer, but no money for treatment? How is this different to the "socialist" case?
> You need to think about more than one possibility. Chanting to yourself over and over again "Government can solve my problems, government can solve my problems" is not going to work.
As opposed to chanting "Government can't solve my problems" or "Only the market can solve my problems"?
But economics, psychologists and other liberal arts types realize that human beings defy "nature" all the time. People who study economics essentially study the cases where economics don't work! Psychologists study why people are not rational/utility maximizers.
I can't speak to psychologists, because those people are nuts, but most economists I've spoken to are generally concerned with 'cases that don't work' only in that they are trying to improve the models. I would also disagree with placing either discipline in the 'liberal arts' category. They can (and usually are) studied as scientific disciplines. Yes, they are probably best termed 'soft sciences' relative to chemistry, but they certainly have more in common with biology than they do with English Literature.
(I canceled my Comcast modem and television service last week. Originally, I just wanted to get rid of the television service, but they told me that if I did, they were going to jack up my cable modem price by $15. I told them to cancel everything.)
I'll try not to be snide here, but without context, this sounds like biting off your nose to spite your face. Are you dropping the service because they make too much money? How do you determine that? Profit (to be distinguished from 'economic profit') is perfectly acceptable. How are prices set? A common misconception is that it is "(price of goods or services) + x%" where 'x' is an arbitrary amount that someone decides the company 'needs'. This is not true. Price is determined based on (here goes the ugly word) markets. In a transaction, both sides get a deal that is acceptable to themselves. If Comcast says that $100 per month is a good price for them (and how they arrive at that is often based on the above formula) that's fine. As a customer, do you feel you are receiving enough service for that $100 per month? That's all that matters. Why should a consumer care how much Comcast gets? All that really matters is what YOU get.
Sorry, I lost it somewhere and started rambling.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Well, I think the original poster mentioned something about reading the news. These aren't hypothetical links. The guy who pulled the fraud has confessed that it really was a scam to milk California by deliberate fraud. Go look in Google News for Enron stories from this week.
Wow! He sure managed to do a lot of damage in 2 years. Do you think the previous 8 years could have had an impact too?
sarcasm
Granted, I am using "liberal arts" as a term that includes the social sciences. But the term shrinks to an un-useful scope when you start dissecting it. Political science can be very scientific, as can philosophy, linguistics and other fields included in "liberal arts." As for my Comcast remarks, I canceled because the price that I will bear for high speed internet is about $40-$50 a month, which is lower than what they want to provide services for. Fine. But I admit that I am punishing them for what I feel is a coercive marketing tactic. Or rather, I am voting my displeasure at being squeezed. First, they are taking advantage of a monopoly on cable services in my area. Second, cable television and cable modem service were offered separately at first and both operate with very comfortable profit margins. Now, they say that if you don't sign up for both, we are going to increase our profit margin on one to 80 percent? How abused I feel by the company directly ties in to how satisfied I am with the product.