Some truth about Comcast - WikiLeaks style

Mon Dec 20 01:48:04 UTC 2010

On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 08:20:49PM -0500, Bryan Fields wrote:
> 
> The government granting a monopoly is the problem, and more lame 
> government regulation is not the solution.  Let everyone compete on a 
> level playing field, not by allowing one company to buy a monopoly 
> enforced by men with guns.

Running a wire to everyone's house is a natural monopoly. It just 
doesn't make sense, financially or technically, to try and manage 50 
different companies all trying to install 50 different wires into every 
house just to have competition at the IP layer. It also wouldn't make 
sense to have 5 different competing water companies trying to service 
your house, etc. This is where government regulation of the entities who 
ARE granted the monopoly status comes into play, to protect consumers 
against abuses like we're seeing Comcast commit today.

Personally I think the right answer is to enforce a legal separation 
between the layer 1 and layer 3 infrastructure providers, and require 
that the layer 1 network provide non-discriminatory access to any 
company who wishes to provide IP to the end user. But that would take a 
lot of work to implement, and there are billions of dollars at work 
lobbying against it, so I don't expect it to happen any time soon. :)

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
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