When newspapers were the major source of public information were they distributed universally for free?
The author is correct: it all about power. Always has been, always will be.
“Universal Service” is their goal, count on it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_service
Universal service is an economic, legal and business term used mostly in regulated industries, referring to the practice of providing a baseline level of services to every resident of a country.
Once that goal is attained, then regulatory oversight naturally follows.
“The parallels with health care are striking. “
It was the same with railroads, the electric grid, telephone and the banking system.
The railroad regulation was particularly harmful. The Hepburn Act, the legislation which completed the take-over of the RR industry, is believed to have caused the panic of 1907 since many owned railroad securities as their retirement nest egg which became nearly worthless. And of course that started the ball rolling for justification of the creation of the Federal Reserve.
It seems that nearly everyone has learned a lesson from that, except the Obama administration that still insists that doing something like this is for the good of everyone, when we know the unintended (or perhaps intended) consequeces produce the opposite results.
In addition to this, the lame-duck senate was confirming judges yesterday, nominees who would not have a chance of confirmation if they were punted to the 112th congress. It smacks a bit to me like the midnight judges strategy of the Federalists. This FCC thing might have something to do with it, although I think it might part of the broader startegy for Obama to do things by executive order without the consent of congress in general and have these guys rubber stamp whatever he happens to do.
Government regs do a poor job with fast moving technologies.
I live in a rural, farming area. I also have about half a dozen reasonable broadband options (cable, two flavors of terrestrial wireless, several reasonably priced cell options, satellite) ... pretty much everything but DSL.
Many of us remember that the big dial-up providers (AOL, CompuServe) had favored their own private offerings. In the case of AOL, they were uniquely qualified to cache and mirror high traffic news sites. It should not surprise anyone that the fastest loading dense site was CNN.
Near the end, providers were talking about limiting usage, as some people were online ALL day, and previous models clocked usage. The market made those plans shrivel up into a three day old wad of chewed Trident strawberry twist chewing gum.
Unlike electricity and natural gas, broadband Internet access is NOT a natural monopoly. There is also a fair amount of hypocrisy here. The cell providers have all sorts of crazy restrictions on what their phones can and can’t do, based on marketing and intellectual property control, NOT technical features.
Capacity will be even LESS of a problem in the near future. Cisco has developed technology that will allow speeds of greater than a gb per second download, and backbone features with massive upgrades over the current acceptable speeds.
Those who cannot afford broadband in their area need only get a $100 used laptop and head down to the library, most Burger Kinds, (get a buck double and water for their trouble) Borders, etc. etc.
The FCC did not get involved with porn on cable because the final transmission did not go over the public broadcast airwaves. Why do they even have jurisdiction here? By the time the FCC had tried to give good ol’ UHF equity with VHF on home televisions (first by mandating that UHF tuners be included, then by requiring all click stop VHF TVs also have click-stop UHF knobs), cable was already in half of the households, on the way to rendering the matter moot.
Besides the raw assertion of control, this is more of the same.
No fan of the FCC here and I think they are overstepping their authority BUT...if your electric company upped the voltage to 180 volts, because they wanted to force you to only buy compatible appliances from them...AND you couldn’t go anywhere else for your electricity (most people can’t go anywhere else for their Internet access or are technical enough to do so), wouldn’t the gov’t be helpful in making the electric company maintain 120 volts?
No fan of the FCC here and I think they are overstepping their authority BUT...if your electric company upped the voltage to 180 volts, because they wanted to force you to only buy compatible appliances from them...AND you couldn’t go anywhere else for your electricity (most people can’t go anywhere else for their Internet access or are technical enough to do so), wouldn’t the gov’t be helpful in making the electric company maintain 120 volts?