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Re: What about... said by dslcreature:What if I offered an Email-only service where you would only have access to sending and receiving email..no web..etc at a significantly reduced price. Would this be allowed?
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No amount of regulation will protect and improve access to the network more than presence of real competition.
A smorgasbord of choices wouldn't be bad. (I wouldn't mind metered billing either.). But, the real problem is as you noted: lack of competition. Without competition there's no assurance that the buffet or the price per bytes would be customer-driven. No assurance the ISPs capital expenditures, capacity planning, profit margin would be customer driven.
We either need local ISPs to be under public-utility oversight, or municipal ownership of the last mile (allowing ISPs to compete for every household).
Everything else is just addressing the symptoms, not the problem. | |
 56403739Less than 5 months leftPremium
join:2006-03-08
Naples, FL
kudos:2 | said by amigo_boy:Everything else is just addressing the symptoms, not the problem. And there's the rub. None of this is about customer choice or real competition. The regulations are written by the regulated, and while the surface looks shiny and new the implementation is as hollow and cynical as the term "network neutrality" itself has become. Nothing in here stops Comcast (for instance) from blocking Netflix or Amazon VoD as long as Comcast says you can't use them on a Comcast account, upfront at the ordering stage (while pitching their own VoD services instead). How many people do you think will shrug their shoulders, click "place order" and never look back anyway? They could easily put the competition out of business and be completely within this new regulatory framework, and that is precisely what they bought.
Comcast, AT&T and Verizon wrote these rules; make no mistake that they already have the mechanisms necessary to get around them. | |
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