said by openbox9:Anti-competitive behavior has occurred in a few instances and it's typically been squashed fairly quickly. ?
Wait wait, you don't think inflated special access prices is anticompetitive? There are ISPs in rural areas paying $100+/mb of bandwidth because only one company, either Verizon or AT&T, runs a line there, and they can price at whatever the heck they want. Even Sprint is at the mercy of V & T's special access lines.
quote:
Backroom deals? Our country is founded in part on making deals, and unless you have examples, I don't see how they're illegal.
It's anti-competitive you moron. If V, T, and Google are sorting out rules in closed-door meetings with an FCC in meetings without any input from the consumer or small businesses, how can anyone else compete?
quote:
Cartel-like pricing? Hardly. Lack of sufficient competition in certain markets to get profit margins as thin as possible to favor consumers, possibly. But how is that illegal
*faceslap* 90% of the industry is owned by 4 companies. What the heck do you think the word "cartel" even means? The antitrust measurement gauge that the FCC uses, the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, has jumped by almost 700 points to 2848 since the 2003. A market is "highly concentrated' at 1800. The FCC is supposed to take notice at 2880.
Only Sprint is experimenting with pricing, and that's because they don't have a choice with all the customers they're losing. AT&T was able to slap on an abusive 2 GB cap despite the falling cost of wireless backhaul.
What kind of evidence beyond this do you NEED to see cartel-like behavior?