Pew Research wants government regulation for US broadband elites.

“Broadband Internet access via cable modem is not subject to the same Soviet-style regulatory constraints placed on Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) providers like AT&T, SBC and Verizon. These constraints, placed on DSL providers by the idiotic Telecommunications Act of 1996, forced their networks to share their infrastructure and provide 'open access' to their less well-funded competitors.
In essence, if SBC spent $100 billion to build a DSL network that blankets the whole of the United States, a guy with some company letterhead that reads 'BubbaTel' in Hope, Arkansas would legally be able to charge his customers to use SBC’s network as a 'broadband reseller.' Not only that, but BubbaTel gets to charge his customers less than the SBC retail price for them to use the SBC network because he didn’t actually spend any money to create the network (which is what SBC uses to calculate the usage cost for their real paying customers and therefore allows SBC to generate a profit). Contrary to the leftist intellectuals who have no concept of free markets, government regulations are why there are so few people who can get DSL in the United States.”

Yes, if you have a DSL line or cable modem, you're one of the "elites" in the United States. Aren't you ashamed of how you're flautingly your wealth to those have-nots on the other side of the "digital divide?"

The liberal/leftist Pew Research guys think you should be...

Full story is at http://www.worldtechtribune.com/worldtechtribune/asparticles/buzz/bz06242002.asp

I have less than zero sympathy for AT&T, SBC, Verizon, or any of the other telcos. Generally, they're a bunch of greedy, half-witted clods that can't get out of their own way. Further, the reason that there isn't as much DSL out there as there ought to be is because the the telcos engineered it that way. They (as usual) were way behind the technological curve and were not ready to do their own deployment of DSL when their competitors were. The deal with the Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers (ILEC's) was that they would get to enter the long-distance market if they would allow Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLEC's) access to their "last-mile" wiring. As usual, the greedy, duplicitous ILEC's told Congress "Sure, we'll do that!" and then proceeded to make the lives of the CLEC's as miserable as possible while they reaped the benefit of their new long distance services and at the same time, prevented any base of competition in DSL from being established until they got around to doing their own deployment 24 months later. The ILEC's SUCK, plain and simple, and if there's any blame to be found, it rests squarely with them.

Look, if the forced regulation doesn't spur competition (which it doesn't) amongst most of the players in an industry, you don't then force regulation upon the only thriving industry player. That's like Josef Mengele saying: "Those gas chambers worked on 99% of the Jews I threw in, but amazingly one out of every hundred would survive. In an effort to better those odds I should switch to ovens rather than gas chambers!"

True believers in a free market economy shouldn't be rooting for the government to force regulations onto the cable broadband industry because of perceived corporate iniquities. That's redistribution of wealth and socialism. Instead, we should be hoping these moronic governmental regulators would take the shackles OFF of the DSL providers.

Enron, Global Crossing and ImClone did criminal acts. They will be punished. Saying ILECs are criminal because they didn't want the government to force usage of their expensive network infrastructure at cost to their competitors to resell for their competitor's profit via regulation seems hypocritical.

True believers in a free market economy shouldn't be rooting for the government to force regulations onto the cable broadband industry because of perceived corporate iniquities. That's redistribution of wealth and socialism. Instead, we should be hoping these moronic governmental regulators would take the shackles OFF of the DSL providers.

Enron, Global Crossing and ImClone did criminal acts. They will be punished. Saying ILECs are criminal because they didn't want the government to force usage of their expensive network infrastructure at cost to their competitors to resell for their competitor's profit via regulation seems hypocritical.

There's a couple of things wrong here. True believers in a free market economy believe in competition, not monopoly. Go up against the ILECs some time and find out how much they believe in a free market economy. I'm not rooting for regulation to be imposed on the cable industry beyond preventing monopoly, which they're pretty close to achieving. Ask how many shackles are on Covad - one of the last surviving CLECs that the telcos haven't managed to trash. And government didn't force the ILECs to let other people use their last mile; they jumped at the opportunity to re-enter the long distance market and were happy to promise (and deliberately not deliver) local access to their last mile. When it comes to ILEC's, all of this talk about "free-market economy" is a bunch of hooey because as soon as somebody actually tries to compete with them on their own turf, they know they're going to lose every time because of their bureaucratic, dead-dinosaur lack of inertia, ergo, they talk nice about accommodating competition and then proceed to use their weight sabotage their flyweight competitors. Ask ChoiceOne about how they get treated by Verizon before you start shedding too many tears about the poor ILECs.

If Covad was a real company laying down miles of cable and paying billions for their own fiber optic network infrastructure, I could see why people would shed tears for them.

Reality is that the majority of Covad's network siphons off of the existing copper wires first laid down by AT&T, SBC, Verizon, et al. The "evil monopolies" got to be number one by taking the risk and building a business.

If you want the government to "force" an action in an effort for fairness and competition, "force" companies like Covad to take the risk of spending the money for laying down some lines of their own and building their own network. Covad will own it and will rightly be able to do whatever they want with it.

Heck, that's America!

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.