Slashdot Mirror
The $200 Billion Broadband Rip-Off
Jamie noted that Cringley has a piece about the US Broadband situation. He talks about where we were and where we are: 'not very fast, not very cheap Internet service that is hurting our ability to compete economically with the rest of the world' and about the $200B the phone companies got to make it that way.
While you're right, of course, about this being a story about government regulation, I don't see how that negates the contradiction I pointed out in my post. Without regulation, corporations would have even more leeway to stifle competition and transparency - examples of which abound, especially outside of western culture (example: the now richest guy in the world, the Mexican telecom magnate and his monopoly in Mexico).
A-Bomb
Except this isn't an example of "unbridled market capitalism". The original copper network was a private/public compromise built on private property seized by the government with its power of immanent domain.
The federal government allowed monopoly control of the copper by one company, as long as it agreed to follow certain rules that a normal company would not need to. That is why multiple phone companies were allowed to compete on the same copper.
Now we have the case where companies are not fulfilling their part of the bargain and the government isn't enforcing it any more.
Not the Netherlands - they have a +$45 billion trade balance and a budget surplus. Financially, they are golden. The only G7 country that is in similarly great financial shape is Canada.
Well it negates your point because it's the same thing over and over. For every single example you'll pull up about supposed "unbridled capitalism" quashing competition you'll find that if you actually examine the details, the lack of competition is a direct result of government interference and regulation.
The same is true of Carlos Slim, the Mexican telecommunications guy you refer to, if you research what is behind his wealth, it's a direct result of a government sanctioned monopoly, no one could compete with him because it was literally against the law. (He built his empire under Telmex, the government sanctioned telephone monopoly and has since used that base to acquire other telecommunications companies in South America). That is your example of capitalism?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to dog on you. I think it's the general idea that government regulation is always for the benefit of the common citizen. Regulation is in and of itself neutral, it can be designed to benefit the commoner, but it can just as easily be designed to benefit the oligarch.
The government, through its threats of force or its failure to protect its citizens from the use of private force and enforce the rule of law (extortion, fraudulent contracts, thuggery and thievery) is the only entity that can hinder competition.
...the Mexican telecom magnate and his monopoly in Mexico
A very heavily government protected monopoly. Hardly a case of "lack of regulation" I guarantee you. In fact it's a prime example for the libertarians to use against regulation. What we need is for the public to keep a close eye on how things are regulated and actually use their vote to weed out the crooks, otherwise it will only get worse.
What?
He pays some ridiculous amount of money monthly...
He also pays ~$7/gal for gas (the highest in Europe).
If he makes more than EUR$53,000, he pays 52% in income tax. Add on to that 6.5% for the "free" health insurance premium, a flat tax of 25% on any 'substantial business interest'. There are other taxes as well.
Holland is great. Lived there for 3 years. But there are substantial differences between Holland and the US. Differences that make a direct comparison, on narrowly selected data points, silly.
he can travel to any country in the EU without even slowing down as he drives across the border
Going from Holland to Belgium to France is quite similar to going from NY to Pennsy to Ohio. No big deal.
I don't think double taxes would cover it. I pay an average of 42% income tax, 19% sales tax on most things, 6% on food and such.
As for transportation, I picked out a lease car from my work, which had a retail price of 23k euro's, and a before-taxes price of 14k euro's (19% sales tax and 'BPM', a separate tax on new vehicles). After this, a car owner would pay road tax, several hundred a year. Then you pay the equivalent of US$7.25 per US gallon for gas, which mostly comprises tax.
Mostly I don't consider this a bad thing, but we only ever get new taxes, even when older taxes were supposed to have been *replaced* by the newer taxes. But it ain't all roses.
Yeah, and where do you live? Because I can guarantee if you're not in a town with at least 10-12 households that would pony up for DSL service, it's not going to happen. That involves installing a DSLAM that's going to run at least a few grand, plus one or several T1 lines to supply the bandwidth back to the CO 8 miles away, not to mention T1-to-ethernet converters, etc.
If you live outside of town you can just about forget it. Go get satellite internet.
I agree with this and have said it myself many times. It is a wonderful quote. It is in the headlines everyday, "free markets for everyone else, protection for me". As an example, watch how this sub-prime mortgage market plays out. Watch how the government will jump in and bail thses folks out. If it were you or I making these very poor quality business decisions, we would be ridiculed, and basically told you get what you deserve. You can also see this applied in a class sense as well. Free markets for the lower classes, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, restructuring bankruptcy laws etc....protectionism and bailouts for the upper classes.
In a two sides of the same coin kinda way, free market is like communism, in that it has never really existed, mostly due to the people involved, and it will never exist in the ways intended. The closest we get to it is like a farmer's market setup, which is really more along the lines of what Smith had in mind.
Many people forget that in the era Smith was writing there were quite large government funded monopolies over many trades. Adam Smith's ideal was a market comprised solely of small buyers and sellers. He showed how the workings of such a market would tend toward a price that provides a fair return to land, labor, and capital, produce a satisfactory outcome for both buyers and sellers, and result in an optimal outcome for society in terms of the allocation of its resources. He made clear, however, that this outcome can result only when no buyer or seller is sufficiently large to influence the market price. This latter point is not frequently mentioned by those who repeatedly invoke Smith. Such a market implicitly assumes a significant degree of equality in the distribution of economic power. Again, this point too is all to frequently disregarded in discourse about free markets. Some quotes are golden:
"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all." Was translated by free market proponents as basically the government has no role in the day to day lives of people. There is no mention of the reverse, no mention of government intervention to set and enforce minimum social, health, worker safety, and environmental standards in the common interest--to protect the poor against the rich. I would recommend "The betrayal of Adam Smith" from which a lot of this is drawn. It is good, but not great, and makes some provocative points. Better yet, take a summer and read the book, and while reading it, evaluate the setting in which Smith was writing. You will likely draw some very different conclusions then what you see spouted off in the business press. In many instances by people who have never read the work.Argh. The laws of science be a harsh mistress.
Corporate person-hood. I hate when my corporation gets called up for jury duty, but I guess it's worth it for the right to vote. Now if only we could get a corporate-birth abortion ban to protect those startups.
If you wanted to discuss how giving money to politians should or shouldn't be protected speech I'm sure someone could oblige you; there are reasonable arguments to be made for both sides. But it's ridiculous to pretend that the problem is with financial entities and not people -- if we didn't let corporations give money or whatnot directly, couldn't the owners and officers of those corporations give money as individuals? Are you suggesting that by becoming an owner or officer in a corporation one should be required to give up their personal rights?
Corporations aren't people and aren't treated legally as people, except insofar as their owners are people. Various forms of financial entities are granted rights of possession and litigation in line with their purpose as financial entities, but they aren't treated as people in general. The supposed "person-hood" that financial entities have is an extension of the actual, physical person-hood that their owners have -- corporations have rights to free speech because their owners have rights to free speech, and I don't see any pratical way to change that, short of opressing the person-hood of business owners.
Your bullshit call is for the most part the only thing that is bullshit. The grand parent is correct you can travel between any of the original 13 EU members without stopping. Since the Schengen agreement all interior border controls were removed and the only border and customer enforcement is around the edges. If you have an EU passport its relatively easy to move around and work in EU countries.
The grandparent slightly overstates when he said "any country in the EU" since I don't think the newer members have signed on to these open borders yet.
The EU has really become the United States of Europe. Its more like the early United States since the states still retain a lot of power, but assuming it holds together it will probably continue to become more like one nation over time.
@de_machina
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
While there are indeed still exceptions, there's no question it's getting harder and harder to find an industry where monopolies don't tend to form of their own volition in the absence of regulatory intervention. Local mom-and-pop shops, for example, are almost completely extinct now. Acquisitions and mergers are ensuring that the corporations who put small businesses under eventually get swallowed up by the biggest fish until there's only the one or two left.
Try to name, for example, an industry that was around 100 years ago that is still around today and is MORE competitive now than it was in 1907.
A-Bomb
Actually, "corporate personhood" only protects the owners (i.e., shareholders), not employees. Employees of a non-corporate company (i.e., a partnership) are no more or less liable for their actions that those of a large corporation. In principle, employees are responsible for their actions, and management is responsible for actions of their underlings, though in practice it is hard to convict people, this has nothing to do per se with their status as a corporation. The difference is, in a partnership, if an employee screws up while performing duties for the company, all partners have potentially unlimited financial liability. In a corporation, liability to the owners only extends to the assets held by the corporation.
There are lots of other ways in which corporations are treated as people, but most of it comes down to "they are non-person entities which can own property" -- this is the root of their ability to be slandered or libeled, their ability to be a party to a lawsuit, and so forth.
Easy enough, if you did indeed RTFA, the link to the 400+ page ebook about this scandal is on the right page:d f
:)
http://www.teletruth.org/docs/SCANDALFINAL92006.p
I'm glad its free now, the author used to charge for it. Maybe I can finally read it.
Essentially very little of the $200 billion is anything to do with phone rates. Its mostly stuff like corporate tax breaks from states and local gov to the companies.
A quick check of the ebook shows:
Chapter 19 on page 191 of the PDF starts the coverage of the money trail.
A random example on page 200:
"[Southwestern Bell's] Telefuture 2000, the plan for Missouri, froze local service rates, and required a $180 million investment in advanced technology."
almost $200 million in a direct investment from the state (not even a tax credit, just a big payment)
There's also another $80 billion in missing equipment (i.e. equipment never purchased, or equipment that was purchased and never installed, or disappeared). So even if you can somehow explain away the $200 billion, there's at least another $80 billion
Note that this book is heavily footnoted (500+ footnotes) so feel free to dig around in the source material (much of it taken from public company documents such as annual reports, or 10-K etc) if you wish to verify any of this.
When the government is a majority government, this happens extremely rarely (I'm a Canadian by the way). It's only when the ruling party is a minority that this can happen. Our conservatives (which aren't crazy like your right-wing nut case Republican Party btw), for instance, currently rule with a minority government, which means they can be ousted by their adversaries at any given time, which helps keep them in line. In this manner, the Canadian system is much better than the American system (as evidenced by the current mess you guys are stuck with vis a vis Bush, Cheney et al)
When we have a majority government, on the other hand, things are far worse than in the States. Canada has no separation of powers whatsoever. The Prime Minister also heads the Legislative Branch (which enables him to push through any legislation he pleases because of party solidarity which is much, much stronger than what is currently in the StateS) and can assign Supreme Court Judges with relative ease. The only potential check on power, the Senate, is an unelected joke. Half the senators don't bother showing up more than once a year, and they are nothing but a bunch of rubber-stamping leaches on our economy.
In-fact, the complete replacement of the Senate with a body that actually....well, does something, should be important to all Canadians.
Canada is sometimes referred to as the "friendly dictatorship" for this reason.
http://watching-eyes.blogspot.com/
Exactly. Imo it is a lack of understanding of 'building infrastructure." People talk about multiple sets of wires without realizing what that means. Do you realize that power and telephone poles are owned by the companies that have installed them? If you plant a power pole you have to have purchased either property or an easement on property to place that pole. How many subdivisions or other residence concentrations would have enough land or easement space available for purchase for these multiple sets of wires AND poles. Do you expect the pole owners to give way? If a property owner has been forced to give easement do you expect the government to continue to force that property owner to give easement until he has no property? Can residential neighborhoods even exist with that sort of easement competition?
I challenge you in a residential area to see how much you have to go through to string up a private cable across the street to your private neighbor or to tunnel under the ground. You'll have to have agreement from pole owners, pole leasers and road owners. Unless you have a lot more money than its worth, you'll not be doing it legally.
There is a heirarchy on the poles: power, catv, pots, other
Its not always in the same order but where ever your service falls, you have to have an agreement with those other services in the heirarchy to string cable. Pole owners are not going to make agreements with ever person and their brother to string cable, and dont even get me into trenching and tunnelling.
The largest infrastructure of poles is power. Most of the power companies own most of the poles. There are areas where telcoms own poles and maybe even where catv owns poles, but I challenge you to find space on a set of poles when and a legal agreement to string cable without VAST change in government structure.
Good luck.
There is a partial solution. Thanks to the telephone investment earlier, you can get a T1 anywhere, and pay from $300 to $600 / month for 1.5Mb service. Get the neighbors together for a coop, add some WLAN, and you have almost broadband in the sticks that doesn't have multi-second latency like satellite. Get enough neighbors together with a lily pad WLAN, and you can upgrade to T3. (I know people who have done this. Don't use consumer WAPs designed for indoor use. Use outdoor models for a few $100 more that have lightning protection.)
If you can get line of sight to a friend/business partner in a nearby city, you can get 54Mb via a point to point wireless connection. With parabolic antenna, you can go quite a ways. The current record is 237 miles from a city to the side of a mountain in Venezuela (the mountain is critical to this setup as otherwise the horizon would block line of sight at this distance).
Finally, cell phone service goes many more places than broadband, and cell carriers offer broadband plans via their network. (So long, and thanks for all the honey...)
America has its fair share of problems, but we arn't going to fix them with socialism.
Uhm... and why not? Does it matter what it's CALLED?
Btw, would you say Sweden is a socialist country, for example? If so, would you mind explaining me what's wrong with them, and why you think US is then so much better than Sweden, considering they apply lots of "social" principles?
(most people whining about socialism have no fucking idea what word "social" in "socialism" means, it seems)
I already pay $50 a month for a 10Gb download cap. I *am* paying by the megabyte, whether I use it or not. And if they throttle me enough, I won't even be able to download every megabyte I paid for in the first place.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
BZZT YOURE WRONG.
God I love morons. Corporations do not have person-hood status because of the owners. They have it because of a Supreme Court decision in the 1970s. Before that decision Corporations did not have any constitutional rights. Nor should they because they are not people. The courts had to declare a Corporation a Person in order for it to have Constitutional rights.
You can easily revoke Constitutional rights from Corporations be declaring Corporations as non-person. Period.
Also, Corporation were more regulated and held accountable to their actions before the 20th century:
"In the United States, government chartering began to fall out of vogue in the mid-1800s. Corporate law at the time was focused on protection of the public interest, and not on the interests of corporate shareholders. Corporate charters were closely regulated by the states. Forming a corporation usually required an act of legislature. Investors generally had to be given an equal say in corporate governance, and corporations were required to comply with the purposes expressed in their charters."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation
Government exists today to protect Corporations and not the people. The irony here is we have protectionist measures that protect Corporations and prevent competition. This is in essence anti-capitalism.
arrest and convict Kevin Delay (Enron)
You mean Kenneth Lay? Kenny Boy was convicted because he *personally* broke the law. Corporate personhood won't shield anyone from taking responsibility for their criminal actions. It provides for establishing a financial collective that has some rights and responsibilities of a human person.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.