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FCC Leaves Broadband Alone

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the no-touche-me dept.

DaPhreaker writes "As reported by The Industry Standard in this article. The F.C.C has decided to take a hands off approach on the broadband market. " While I would advocate opening the lines up, I think the FCC may have adopted the best position for the next six months - let things sort themselves out more, especially in light of the rising battle between DSL and cable.

3 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. Action via Inaction by Effugas · · Score: 5

    To claim that a laissez-faire attitude towards Broadband doesn't in fact create fundamental shifts in the regulatory structure of network access is ludicrous.

    One of the prime factors of the Internet's ascent over the past few years has been the tens of thousands of people who chose to start up their own small businesses(guess what--not everything's a startup!) and provide Internet service to people.

    While AOL was falling over itself just to pick up the phone, those thousands of people gave personal, real, one on one service to people all across the country--the world, for that matter.

    Those of us in the open source world would do well to remember not all development comes from college students--ISPs fund development of critical infrastructure that's used today on an every day basis to keep things running.

    I don't know what kind of delusion the FCC is under that AT&T will give up and divest itself of its broadband operations if it is forced to provide copper services to other ISPs. I do know that thousands of ISPs going out of business because the FCC believed the threats of the country's most powerful phone company(of course, being chased heavily by that UUNet/PsiNet/WorldCom/MCI/Sprint behemoth; who needs trusts when you have mergers?) smacks of injustice.

    Nobody wants to regulate the net, meanwhile the entire concept behind failing to regulate the net is that self-regulation will occur. Self-regulation is presumed mainly in competitive environments where the failure of one party to "play by the rules" leads to a loss in market share to the gain of a competitor. ADSL and Cable companies are similar enough in corporate structure that both are likely to violate the same concepts that self regulation would be likely to solve.

    Thus, the war on self regulation takes its shape as a demand for freedom. Whose freedom, of course, has been muddled substatially.


    Yours Truly,

    Dan Kaminsky
    DoxPara Research
    http://www.doxpara.com

  2. No Surprise Here by mochaone · · Score: 4

    Listen folks, the Republican congress is no friend of the consumer. They only care about aggrandizing big business. Remember, these are the folks who de-regulated the cable industries. We all know how well that's gone. Poor customer service. Rampant increase in cost in comparison to inflationary costs and investment in infrastructure.

    My cable company went from having 2 plans (basic or expanded) to a "tier" structure giving consumers 3 options. This was done, according to the cable folks, so that customers would only pay for the channels they actually wanted to view. The customers who wanted fewer channels would not have to subsidize other views, they told us.

    Here's how it really works. The cable companies have shifted a good majority of the cable channels that used to be part of the basic service to the top tier. This is all done under the guise of giving you, the consumer, more choice. More money out of your pocket. Cable companies don't offer a la carte programming. When asked why not, they never give a reason. Local sports programming that used to be included as part of basic service is now part of the top tier service.

    Opening up broadband will not weaken the cable companies any more than opening up the phone system to independent carriers weakened the local telephone monopolies. It's called competition. Not too many people in business want to compete anymore. And we all lose out.

    I decided to opt of the cable service. Unfortunately, I won't have that luxury with broadband.

    --
    Hates people who have stupid little sigs
  3. Regulation, hell. It's called "common carrier". by Tau+Zero · · Score: 5
    Both I and others have made this point before, but I'll make it again:
    Most cable installations were created, and paid for, under a grant of an exclusive franchise. This is an inherently anti-competitive situation, and it should not be allowed to continue.
    Cable companies are infamous for acts such as getting rid of the channel you want and substituting something you have no use for, and accepting "deals" from content suppliers which require them to carry several channels of crap so they can get one popular one. Now these cable companies are suddenly in the ISP business. What does this mean for the customers?
    • Since the cable company has an exclusive on the local broadband market, the customer can expect to see useless "services" layered into their bill.
    • Access to other ISP's will be slower and/or more difficult.
    • Should the phone company roll out xDSL, these mega-companies can be expected to behave like the airlines: when one of them adds a "service" or raises prices, the other will too. Customer choice will all but vanish.
    The FCC should have bitten the bullet and kicked the cable companies (and the phone companies) out of the content business. Entities which supply bandwidth should not be able to tie that product to a particular brand of content; the customer should be able to go anywhere for pay content, or forego it entirely and only visit free sites. The only thing the monopoly cable/phone companies should be allowed to do is move data; everything else should be the province of independent, free-market suppliers.
    --
    Deja Moo: The feeling that
    --
    Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.