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SCOTUS To Hear Small ISPs' Case Against AT&T
snydeq writes "The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear an antitrust case that alleges AT&T squeezed out small ISPs by charging too much for wholesale access to its phone network. The case, originally brought to US District Court in 2003, had been appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. But AT&T requested the case be heard by the Supreme Court on the grounds that prior conflicting appeals court decisions in this area should be resolved at that level. As part of the case, the Supreme Court will likely also ascertain whether AT&T could be held to violate antitrust law without setting its retail prices below its own cost."
In the US the phone lines are consistently referred to as "the public network" in FCC rules and regulations. I owned an ISP in Michigan and yes the telcos did squeeze out the small guys. SBC offered to sell me DSL lines at 37.99 per month when they were selling them at 39.99 per month. For that measly 2.00 per month per customer I was expected to provide tech support, billing and collection services and accept all of the bad debt risk. At that point I decided to get out of the ISP business and concentrate of other things. Pity that one large company can put 6,000 small ISPs out of business when their infrastructure was given to them by the people (think of the right of way behind you house that they use for nothing.
In the USA, we tend to not trust our governments very much (that whole taxation without representation thing), so we're constantly vacillating between government and private ownership of public services. We often compromise on government-regulated monopolies for such infrastructure, which occasionally works reasonably well.
In Texas, for example, the power wiring is owned by a government-regulated monopoly, but power generation is privately owned and competitively sold to consumers across the public (well, monopoly-owned) grid.
As I understand it, the original wired communications infrastructure ("the Bell system") was installed by a government-regulated monopoly (AT&T), which was later broken up into regional companies ("Baby Bells") that owned the wiring and local phone service. Long-distance service between them was opened to competition, one competitor of which was the original AT&T (which was barred by regulation from owning wires).
Then the telecom market was de-regulated (because we don't trust the government), resulting in the Texas "Baby Bell" (Southwestern Bell, or SBC) buying up several other regional Babies and then the long-distance company AT&T (whose name it took), then diversifying into Internet, satellite TV, and various other communications arenas and re-establishing at least part of the old monopoly.
Does that simplify things? Well, it doesn't help me much either. *sigh*
OK, yes, government ownership of the infrastructure makes sense, but only if you trust government. We don't much, and it shows. So there you are.
Google has purchased dark fibre because:
* it was available; because
* a lot of it was put into the ground and bought by other companies; which
* went busted.
Also, laying dark fibre capacity inter and intracity is way, way different to last-mile access. You have to realise that the US market is full of government-granted monopolies which make laying last-mile access not just prohibitively expensive but a political issue. Damn!
Emminent Domain
a handful of selfish greedy people are no match for millions of selfish, greedy people -u4ya