[opendtv] Re: CommLawBlog
- From: "Manfredi, Albert E" <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 3 Jul 2016 19:49:16 +0000
Craig Birkmaier wrote:
Acoustic modems were authorized by the FCC over several decades. I
suppose you could call this deregulation,
NO, Craig. Modems were allowed, but the telephone line was as neutral as public
and telegraph lines have had to be, ever since the Mann-Elkins Act was signed
into LAW, in 1910. The law of the land. Which means, independent companies that
wanted to do "commerce" on these lines had all the authority they needed to do
so.
Deregulation of the Internet aspect of commerce on the telco lines meant that
now, the telcos could build out their ADSL lines (grooming what was already
there, mostly), and retain the ISP service for themselves. PLUS the telco lines
were now on an equal footing with the cable systems' own broadband service.
This gave the telcos the incentive they needed, and like magic, ADSL became
available to many more people, include ng ourselves, I might add.
This convincingly threw your libertarian rhetoric out the window. With this
partial deregulation, all ISP competition disappeared. (Wow, how is this
possible?) Now, although, yes, we had deregulated cable plus deregulated telcos
for Internet service, the result was still that we went from thousands of
competitors to at most two, at that time, ca. 2001-2002.
But it also reduced the incentive to deploy FTTP,
That's none of the government's business. The telcos have as much incentive to
deploy FTTH as the cablecos have. That's totally irrelevant, Craig. The telcos
had a choice of deploying any of various variants of xDSL, on their existing
lines, or FTTH, just as the cablecos had the choice of retaining coax or moving
to FTTH.
PLUS, I also informed you long ago, FTTH is the most expensive improvement.
Very costly, compared with HFC or xDSL. And, sure enough, Verizon QUIT
expanding FiOS.
The telcos first tried to use ADSL as a cable competitor, but never
got beyond a 1000 home trial in 1995-96.
DUH, Craig! Only because they were forced to share those ADSL lines with
competitive ISPs. Did the cable companies have to? No. And more importantly, I
pointed also this out to you back then, and you still don't get it.
The decision by the FCC to classify broadband as an information
service, was another concession to the telcos,
BS. It was a "concession" that put them on an equal footing with the cable
company competition.
You simply missed everything that was going on, Craig. The bottom line is that
now that ISP service was tied to who owns the infrastructure, rather than being
a neutral service ON TOP OF that infrastructure, the law of neutrality, which
came in effect as far back as 1910, started to make sense for services the ISPs
carry. At first, no big incentive, ISP service was neutral anyway. Then, when
TV carriage began to compete with the cablecos, the expected happened.
So now, the over 100 year old tradition of network neutrality was made to apply
also on Internet service.
And as an added bonus, the tired old libertarian rhetoric was proven to be as
simplistic and nonsensical as most people know it to be.
Bert
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