Slashdot Mirror
Bill Ready To Ban ISP Caps In the US
xclr8r writes "Eric Massa, a congressman representing a district in western New York, has a bill ready that would start treating Internet providers like a utility and stop the use of caps. Nearby locales have been used as test beds for the new caps, so this may have made the constituents raise the issue with their representative."
Gaming of a deregulated energy system by crooked companies like Enron played a major part in those rolling brown-outs.
The summary grossly misrepresents what the congressman is proposing.
This bill doesn't "ban ISP caps". It simply says that ISPs will start to become regulated in the same way that phone companies, for instance, are, so that a given ISP would have to put in a submission to raise their rates, explaining why they need to do so, etc.
Most ISPs solution to this would be to immediately switch all plans to a per-byte type of plan (which works given the comparison with utilities. I don't get carte blanche from the electric company to use it all for free, complaining that "they provide 20A to the house so I should be able to use 20A around the clock for free!"), and this would almost certainly not be in the consumer's best interest.
Enron did that, pissed everyone off and suddenly they were put under a microscope.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Except California wasn't really deregulated, there were still caps on in-state kWh charges among other weird rules. They called it deregulation, but what they set up was a hodgepodge of conflicting laws that was just aching to be gamed. Or, in other words, the usual government incompetence in trying to set how a market works based not on sound supply/demand principles, but some social engineering agenda. We saw the same exact thing with the mortgage meltdown, largely caused by the effective requirement that banks make loans they wouldn't ordinarily make. This opened up the whole subprime market, which looked like a great investment when you just applied the historical default rates. Many lenders didn't care, since they were able to outsource the risk in the form of mortgage-backed securities, giving paper ROI estimates that were through the roof based again on historical default rates. Surprise, surprise, subprime borrowers default at a superprime rate, and the whole thing collapsed.