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Prying Open the Cable Market
garzpacho writes "In an interview, FCC chief Brian Martin discusses his efforts to make it easier for new entrants--especially telecoms-- to compete with traditional cable and satellite companies in delivering video services. The focus of this effort seems to be in addressing local franchising authorities' current bias towards incumbents. He also talks about current congressional efforts to enact national franchise legislation."
Who owns the physical media in the ground.
Get paid to code OSS
He wants to allow the telcos, a demonstratively corrupt group of companies, access to traditional cable services?
And this benefits the average customers...how exactly?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Good idea, Comrade.
BZZZZZ
The amount of cable/fiber for public telecom infrastructure is vanishingly small. What the public gave is the right to exclusively lay cable to provide a particular service (telephone or cable originally). Initially for cable this was a reasonable deal as installing a municipal cable system was something that operators were reluctant to do if there was good reception.
The problem is we are still operating on agreements that were negotiated when there was no such thing as premium cable, and often were made by bought and paid for politicians.
My own feeling is that anyone should be able to offer cable service to a neighborhood if they can post a bond and meet basic operating competencies for a public utility. Same goes for phone.
Every penny of that copper belongs to the public if it was laid under an exclusive franchise. Those who live by regulation, die by it. If they have infringed on the publics' right to free competition, they have obligations to that public. Every penny they invest comes from your loss of price competition.
There are two ways to fix the problem. You let others compete or you limit profits as a fixed proportion of investment. As new technologies emerge and the price of telco installation falls, I'm leaning more towards the free for all.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Many people are totally ditching their landlines in favor of VoIP over cable broadband. Dialtone is such a commodity now it fills me with glee. No doubt this is troubling to the bells, so they decide to fight back against the cable offerings by running TV over their copper.
This can only lead to more commoditized TV, which can only mean one day we'll be downloading/streaming your shows from web sites on our own schedule.
Telco and cable company at each other's throats? I can hardly wait.
Unbelievable isn't it? You and I don't think it's a good idea to let Ma Bell extend their regulated reach. It would be fine if everyone was free to compete, but they are not. The crooks are about to be rewarded.
The FCC has this strange idea that all you need is two companies to service all your communication needs. Really. The FCC thinks that all you need is one phone company and one cable company each offering the same services. They probably continue this line of though with some kind of bogus economies of scale argument, where Ma Bell and her copper wires everywhere is still a good idea, sixty years after such technology has been obsoleted. In any case, that's what all of these telco mergers have come from. Oh yeah, you only need one radio station and one newspaper. This is going to work about as well as "competition" in the oil industry.
It only makes really sense when you consider the federal government's current hunger for control and eavesdropping. They can more easily bully around one or two of their own creatures than they can a free market. Uncle Sam wants your email, your browsing, your TV watching, your library records, what you buy, every fucking total information awareness thing you can think of. A few pigs are going to get very rich helping them out. The rest of us are going to suffer stagnant networks and an utter lack of privacy. You are not even going to be able to begin to compete when the Carnivore system is complete.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
TWC Digital Phone, Vonage, Lingo, and cell phone services are already giving them a rough ride. Why else do you think (telcoms) they want to prioritize the IP packets?
Life is not for the lazy.
There's little reason for a telecom to uprade it's infrastructure. If they do, they have to give away access to competitors. Cable companies have no such restrictions.
I like the idea of mandating unrestricted access to municiple areas by competing companies. Right now only one cable company can do business in certain areas because of a deal with that city, and the city bars anyone else from coming in...unless they are satelite TV. More competition between cable TV services in the same area will lead to lower prices. Right now most cable companies can charge whatever they want because there aren't very many other options except for Direct TV, and we know how underhanded cable companies can be towards the satelite companies.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
Trends:
Corps get tax breaks to build infrastructure, then use this infrastructure to kill off competition, lockin customers, and illegally raise their new found monopoly prices.
Sometimes customers revolt. Sometimes they look for alternatives. Usually they baah like sheep.
Government lets this happen.
Media promotes it.
Eventually you're left with only a few services to choose from, most of which suck and are fundamentally pro-business/anti-consumer, and an uneducated population that's blissful to consume all remaining resources until there's nothing left.
I honestly believe the only way to fix this system is to let it collapse under its own weight.
Why keep fighting it? Let them win. Let them own the lines we paid for. Let them charge us whatever they want. Let them build the most protected DRM system ever.
I don't care.
Just let me smoke my weed, if Freedom is really what you stand for.
Actually, the law was changed so that telcos don't have to share fiber lines. That's why Verizon is putting in fiber and ripping out copper wherever they go. Once you have FIOS, you can never switch to Speakeasy, Earthlink, AOL, Yahoo, etc.