Comcast Discontinues Newsgroup Service > Collusion

Collusion

collusion = A non-competitive agreement between rivals that attempts to disrupt the market's equilibrium. By collaborating with each other, rival firms look to alter the price of a good to their advantage. The parties may collectively choose to restrict the supply of a good, and/or agree to increase its price, in order to maximize profits. Groups may also collude by sharing private information, allowing them to benefit from insider knowledge.

I think this qualifies as rival firms colluding to eliminate a service and increase the price of a good to their advantage. The same applies to the new download CAPS. Verizon is the only one not in collusion with the other ISPs for now.

Verizon used to provide a VERY nice news service. It was fast, reliable and had good retention. Verizon even had their own newsgroups for supporting their customers. I remember you could leave a request for Jeremy to add a new newsgroup and if Verizon could get it, it would be added within a few days. You could also watch for service outages, etc. When I moved to a different area I could not get Verizon internet service. I had to take Charter. Charter does still provide uncapped newsgraoup service, but it is throttled to 300Kbps which is not fast enough for any of the binary newsgroups like the old ozzie and harriet (spelling?) radio shows.

It's not collusion when the government requests that companies in a certain industries do something and companies in that industry do it. It's like saying that the phone companies are colluding to charge you taxes on phone service.

Your kidding right? Collusion is when companies conspire knowingly or unknowlingly to fix a price, control bidding, etc.

This has NOTHING to do with taxes assessed by a government entity. Trying to bump your post count or something?

I am of course referring to the New York Attorney General's campaign to get ISPs to limit newsgroup access. For the children, of course. It's not a government MANDATE like taxes are, though the AG was threatening lawsuits IIRC.

I wasn't aware this site even kept track of post counts?