On 8/27/2010 9:14 PM, George Ou wrote:
...
Mr. Oliver on the other hand might acknowledge
that they own it
in name, but they effectively don’t. The fact is that if
these
companies are given the right of way under certain terms,
you can’t
change that. You might be able to say that they have to
lease that right
of way, but that just ends up being a tax on consumers since
the broadband
providers can’t absorb that hit without going out of
business.
George Ou
You make very good points, George. The fact that the FCC (and local
UCs) allowed companies like Verizon to build out their fiber with an
assurance that they wouldn't have to lease them (as they had to
lease their copper) was a huge mistake. However, you are incorrect
when you state that "you can't change that." We did it with copper.
When the copper infrastructure was built out, companies that owned
it did not have to share it. And somewhere along the line,
we wanted competition in local phone and ISP service, so we changed
that. And they didn't go out of business. The only difference here
is that one could argue the copper infrastructure was largely
already a sunk cost, long ago paid for.
I'm very much a free market capitalist except for places where
regulation is appropriate. The very concept of "changing the rules"
and forcing companies to lease their fiber seems like a bad
Chavez-inspired Venezuelan dream. But it's the situation we're in.
The regulatory bodies (state UCs and FCC) have failed us. They've
screwed up. We now have a mess. We can either decide simply to live
with bad Internet -- in an age where that's unthinkable -- or we can
fix it. Where I live in Pennsylvania, they did it with electricity
in the past 10 years. They dealt with the fact that they were
"changing the game" on the electric companies by providing them with
a multi-year time period during which they could collect "transition
fees." These were essentially fees to pay for infrastructure that a
monopoly built, recognizing that it wasn't expecting competition
(and perhaps built inefficiently). Now, our electric bills will
contain two main components: generation and transmission.
Transmission will still be the regulated monopoly. Generation is
free choice open market.
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