routing around Sprint's depeering damage

Mon Nov 3 07:47:47 UTC 2008

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Rod Beck wrote:
> I'll make one comment before 'Alex the Hammer' closes this discussion
> for straying into politics.
> 
> Clearly regulating the incumbents to unbundle local loops has worked
> very well in some European countries (France and possibly others).
> Clearly US financial deregulation has cost the world dearly.
> 
> So regulation is the appropriate response in some cases (I hope that
> is clear given the world financial system almost went under a few
> weeks ago).

I think you're making a faulty logical leap.

Regulation to unbundle local loops works (sometimes) because it is a
simple regulation that undoes what a previous regulation screwed up in
the first place.

That said, flattening the regulations to allow others to properly build
their own loops would likely be more effective, except from a cost
perspective it has a very high barrier to entry - however people could
form smaller operations and simply service their community then grow
that mesh outwards. That is an option I'd take over LLU far more readily.

The issue for me comes from looking at the incumbents position. Many of
these were government owned entities that were privatised, and then
later in some cases gone to public market ownership. It sets a nasty
precedent when you hand a company their privatisation, and then later on
start bullying them around at a very high legal level. Those are still
laws that apply across all other companies too - and in the worst of
cases they are applied across a group of 'license holders' which simply
further entrenches their position. Much of this also tends to alert
governments to the fact that they are financially incentivised to hold
their big money churning incumbents as the tax rewards are greater, and
if they are an African government; hell, just force your incumbents to
give you shares.

So no, regulation is not an appropriate response in some cases, you've
only confused it with deregulation, and it's one I'm not convinced about
either...
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