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When Telecom Mergers Hit Home
netbuzz writes "A telecom manager submitted an essay to Network World that paints a sadly humorous picture of what the mega-telecom mergers really mean on the ground." From the article: "Well, when I heard that these companies were about to combine forces, it made my blood run cold. How would they be able to take, in each case, two companies with already broken processes and mediocre customer support and successfully merge them? How could they continue to provide me with the support I need to keep my company's networks functioning as they need to in this age of the bandwidth junkie? The answer ... at this moment, is they can't!"
It is regulation that creates monopolies, not deregulation. There has never been deregulation in the telecom industry -- the break-up of one monopoly created market monopolies nonetheless.
Regulation is a big beast, it occurs at many levels. Villages regulate to create monopolies, States regulate to create monopolies and the federal government regulates to create monopolies. Regulation are created NOT to help consumers but to create an impossibly high barrier to entry.
The telecoms are dying, so they need to fortify to try to save their domain of control. The Federal government is too slow to react to market needs, so entrepreneurs provide what consumers want -- the Internet has given small companies HUGE stones to beat Goliath with.
Complete deregulation would be so good for consumers that we'd be able to better compete in the world market, rather than price ourselves into oblivion. Real, complete deregulation means chopping laws from the local level to the federal level -- something that NO politician or public service wants as it destroys their power.
In Illinois, the telecom unions are restricting DSL and other broadband roll-outs at the local level. It is ridiculous that people think that deregulation gives telecoms power, it is "re-regulation" that has occured.
The Presidents Analyst~ http://www.popmatters.com/film/reviews/p/president s-analyst.shtml
"And what might this meeting in the middle, this muddling of nation states into a blend of capitalist and authoritarian ideologies, look like? The movie's climax gives us more than a clue when Sidney's path is diverted one last time, into the secretive corporate headquarters of TPC -- "The Phone Company," a knockoff of Bell Telephone, which was in 1967 a tremendous and unpopular monopoly. Spirited away to the star chamber at the center of TPC, Sidney is briefed, James Bond-villain style, on the future of the human race by TPC president Arlington Hewes (Pat Harrington), aided by an animated film that sends up the brilliant propaganda cartoons Frank Capra and others made for Bell Labs throughout the 1950s and '60s. Only this ain't Our Mr. Sun. The company's scheme, Hewes explains, is to make communication more convenient by embedding electrical chips called "cerebrum communicators" -- which are rendered in the cartoon as adorable, big-eyed sprites -- straight into its customers' brains, thereby eliminating the need for expensive cable lines and infrastructure. In effect, TPC hopes to turn its customers into nodes of its communications network. "Congress will have to pass a law substituting personal numbers for names," Hewes explains placidly, "as the only legal means of identification." This technological nightmare fuses free-market corporatism gone amuck with the regimentation and loss of individuality that characterized the Soviet empire -- a meeting in the middle."
Sig Hansen?