The FCC is planning new net neutrality rules. And they could enshrine pay-for-play. - The Washington Post

Fri Apr 25 17:52:00 UTC 2014

Allen McKinley Kitchen (gmail) wrote:
>> ...
>> I don't know what got me to thinking about it earlier today but I recalled when I started at the telephone company in Los Angeles there was a pitch made early on that in earlier days a business in Los Angeles had to have several telephones on desks to be able to talk to all of their customers.
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>> Which was true ONLY because regulation required that each telephone line terminate in an instrument owned by the providing company.
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>> The above statement contains an error that obscures the issue. As someone who also recalls this  state of affairs, I must point out that it was the respective telcos' "regulation" - not government regulation in any sense - that prohibited any equipment but their own from being attached to their lines. In other words, those telcos were behaving anti-competitively with all the power they could muster to do so (surprise!) and also doing whatever they could to obscure that fact.
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>> Regulation was demanded by consumers - in order to protect them from the ridiculous results of this assertion of privilege on the telcos' part. To Mr Sheldon, this resulted in regulation (by government) creating a monopoly. I believe Mr Gilmore might argue that well-crafted regulation requiring interconnectivity as a public good would have prevented both the "need" for monopoly-creating regulation and also would have protected the public from the inherent tendency toward monopoly as vendors do battle to protect their turf rather than provide the best possible outcome for their customers.
>>

Actually, it goes back further than that.  In the really early days, in 
NY, there were lots of phone companies, and a business would have to 
have one of each to serve all its customers.  And long distance was just 
beginning - expensive, requiring operator intervention - and AT&T long 
lines wouldn't necessarily connect to non-Bell system players.  It was 
basically a mess.

Bell kept buying up lots of other telcos, and integrating them into a 
more uniform network (remember "The Bell System") - and eventually ran 
afoul of antitrust issues.  Bell went to Congress and proposed a deal - 
let us buy up everyone, we'll build an integrated system, including 
interconnection to the independents, and you get to regulate us to 
balance out our monopoly power.

Email provides an interesting contrast.  In the early days, the early 
timesharing vendors sold email as a feature, and the size of their user 
bases as a competitive advantage.  Along came Barry Shein, and the World 
- pretty much forcing open some limited public access to the early 
Internet, followed by Compuserve connecting to Internet email, and 
suddenly market pressure pretty much forced everybody to connect their 
private mail systems to the Internet.

Miles Fidelman

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra