 CleanGenePremium,MVM
join:2008-04-09
Manassas, VA | Replying to myself, how lame 
It's rather silly to pretend this report tells us anything of value about any proposed regulatory scheme. From the summary:
At the end of 2006, AT&T, as a condition of its acquisition of BellSouth, was required by the FCC to operate a neutral network for two years. During this period, while operating under network neutrality rules, AT&T's overall gross investment increased by $1.8 billion -- more than any other ISP's in America. See? They had net neutrality, and they still had a whole truckload of capital investments anyway, those lying liars. We can impose that same scheme any time, and they'll still invest anyway!
Except...there's no reason to conclude that. It's just as reasonable - or perhaps more reasonable - to conclude that AT&T invested in capital expenditures because they knew that the regulations were limited in time, and hence they'd still be able to realize some sort of ROI at the end of that. So what does this tell us about the likely behavior of network providers under a permanent, all-encompassing, universal NN regulatory plan? Absolutely nothing whatsoever. And we're not even past page TWO of this thing.
Really, this is very poor argumentation on the part of this group - whoever picked up the tab for this thing ought to be looking for a refund at this point. But, on the other hand, it reinforces the extant groupthink for a certain set of readers, so I guess we'll run with it here  |
