Verizon Public Policy on Netflix

Thu Jul 17 19:46:20 UTC 2014

I meant that comment as more of a snark that if someone wants to argue
let's let the market take care of it then first we should reign in the
govt-issued monopolies and small-N oligopolies.

I just read, I could dig it up, that about 1/3 of all broadband users
have one and only one provider, about 1/3 have 2, and about 1/3 have 3
or more. And a tiny sliver have zero, hence "about".

There has been massive cross-subsidization from voice monopolies also.

The whole thing stinks if one cherishes anything resembling a free and
open market.

But worse, much worse, are the vertical trusts.

Comcast is the nation's major CATV provider with on demand and pay per
view video.

AND Comcast owns NBC Universal.

This is like one company owning almost all the auto manufacturers,
petroleum and gasoline companies, refineries, tire manufacturers, and
the roads and road construction companies. And obtained all that by
government fiat.

All that's left, to beat the analogy to death, is one is more or less
free to drive where they want. And now they're working on that!

And it's getting worse not better (e.g., Comcast is trying to acquire
#2 Time-Warner.) Shall we wait for them to merge with Verizon and then
AT&T before we smell the coffee?

Calling on the FCC to straighten any of this out is nonsense, they
don't have the jurisdiction for starters. And, worse, the FCC's
primary product is media censorship.

What we need is the Dept of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission
to enforce anti-trust law probably with the help of Congress (yeah
good luck with that.)

The FCC is what happens AFTER we admit that we WANT it all to be one
big monopoly like AT&T was pre-breakup. Then of course we'd have to
regulate that monopoly. That's why the FCC was created (and spectrum
management.)

Right now it's the worst of both worlds, they get the effective
monopoly with protections and almost none of the regulation.

We're in a pickle.

On July 17, 2014 at 03:00 owen at delong.com (Owen DeLong) wrote:
     (me...)
 > > Let Comcast, TW, AT&T, Verizon, etc relinquish their monopoly
 > > protections and then perhaps we can see something resembling a free
 > > and open business climate evolve. Even that would deny that they
 > > already have become vast and powerful on these govt-mandated
 > > sinecures.
 > 
 > The problem with this is that so long as service providers are allowed to be facilities providers, there is an economic natural tendency to monopoly or small-N oligopoly in all but the densest of population centers that will result as a simple matter of external reality. It simply costs too damn much to put facilities in for there to be large-N copies of facilities serving the same area.
 > 
 > That is one of the reasons I'm such a huge fan of home-run SWCs[1] with large colos run by a facilities only provider, whether that FOP is a municipality, NGO, or for profit entity (or even multiples if that were to somehow be feasible).
 > 
 > Owen
 > 
 > [1] Serving "Wire" Center -- a hub where all of the fiber from a given distribution area (of radius N where N < maximum reasonable distance served by common transmission technologies available at the time of construction with costs in reason for household usage. Today, I believe that's about 5km, but it may be more).
 > 