Quote:
Originally Posted by 'Hamas' Jenkins
We have antitrust laws, but ATT was able to flout them for the better part of 75 years, and given the current regulatory environment, there's little to suggest that things won't become even more consolidated than in the past.
If you didn't own a Bell telephone you used to have to pay a monthly lease fee and a rewiring charge to get it to work with the system. And given that most telecoms are largely natural monopolies due to wiring, if they become actual monopolies due to competition you can kiss the days of fast, uncapped internet and non-preferential site loading goodbye.
Example: I'm Comcast and I own NBC. A subscriber wants to stream a show on ABC's website. For some odd ****ing reason, that show loads at a fraction of the speed of the peacock's website. Wonder why.
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This and other monopoly abuses are discussed in this Fresh Air piece. In addition to reclassifying cable providers as common carriers, I like her suggestion of following the Stockholm model (using bonds to fund a fiber network and then charging multiple competing providers for access).
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechcons...ing-way-behind