Title II is what gave us MA Bell..remember those days? You HAD to buy phones from them? Comcast isn’t going to get smaller nor is Comcast(nor anyone else) going to get more competitive. The barrier of entry is so high now it’s nearly unfathomable.
All these techno folks calling for “net neutrality” really have no idea how bad Title II was in the landline days. Now they want that for the Internet? Many folks Like Leo Laporte and others on Twit TV say they want to self-regulate but are some of the loudest advocates of government regulation via Title II. I bet they will be the first ones screaming once their access rates shoot the moon. You heard it here first..:)
If/when these rates do explode my clients will get it from both sides. They will be paying higher costs for their access and because I use the internet for many things I will have to raise my rates again.
From The Market Ticker:
(Bloomberg) — Tom Wheeler, chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, outlined a sweeping new set of proposals regulating how companies deliver data over the Internet.
The rules, which would end more than a decade of debate over the open Internet, are designed to protect consumers by barring companies from blocking or slowing Web traffic.
This rule, if it stands and if it is enforced, will cement the monopoly positions of existing cable and phone providers. It is an unmitigated bad for consumers as your bill will go up for “services” that they are forced to provision for whether you want to buy them or not (e.g. Netflix) and worse, there is no end to the monopoly position of those firms
You’re going to lose big on this one folks.
When I ran MCSNet one of the reasons we were able to be competitive in the space was that everyone had to deal with us for circuits on a more-or-less even basis. That’s because we could buy in a competitive market, and when there was no competition we were protected from pricing disparity. That is, in the places where there was no competition there were tariffs for the one company we could buy from.
As DSL and cable came into the game the ability to be competitive disappeared. DSL companies were all selling below cost, which meant that the only question was when my customers were going to wake up with no service as they went out of business, not ifthat would happen. The cable companies had no interest in providing transport to anyone else.
There was no way for me to get equal access to the right of way into your residence or business for high-speed access, no matter how much money I had (or could raise.) That was utterly immaterial as those rights-of-way were closed to me.
Yes, dial-up and ISDN were dying, but we were effectively prohibited from providing a better, faster means of access. We couldn’t acquire the means of access to your building irrespective of funds.
That situation persists today and is why in most places you have exactly one, or maybe two, choices when it comes to such access. You have a cable company and a phone company, typically — and that’s it. One might offer DSL, the other traditional cable. One might offer fiber — maybe. But there is nothing to drive down the price of any of thesebecause comparable access is not available to potential competitors!
Now Wheeler has turned around and mandated that these firms, which have raped you for a decade with their privileged access to your location, >must provision for any enhanced service, such as Netflix, so they can provide it to everyone — whether you as a customer want to buy it or not.
This is going to radicallyincrease these monopolists costs — and without any check and balance in the form of competition guess who’s going to get the bill for that, plus a nasty markup?
You are.
To those of you who advocated for this, including Hastings over at Netflix: You deserve to be in prison.
Competition On The Internet? Forget It in [Market-Ticker].