[Novalug] (no subject)

Nick Danger nick@hackermonkey.com
Tue Feb 11 09:22:02 EST 2014



On 02/10/2014 09:02 PM, Walt Smith wrote:

> Several Joe's tried to startup, under the new rules, and were as 
> promptly placed out of business or gobbled up.  Several 
> entrepreneurs did make money before getting gobbled...  
> MCI, Worldcom...  with big business financing originally to 
> prove there was "competition".  Joe Blow never had a chance.   

Incorrect. MCI and WorldCom were started in the 1980s offering LD
service. They merged in the latter half of the 1990s and eventually went
bankrupt from accounting, uh, creativity. Worldcom did the gobbling and
they were never an ILEC.

There are tons of small competitive businesses in the copper market.
Just search for "T1" service on Google and you'll see. There are still
1/2 dozen smaller CT only providers around the area too.

> And that brings up to today ......  no competitive infrastructure.
> By congressional legislation ... 

Again you are confusing the ILEC copper market, the ILEC fiber market
and the cable market. There *IS* competition in the ILEC copper market.
Pretty fierce competition too. That is what legislation brought to the
market. I used to pay a few dollars more for ADSL back in the day
because the provider ran their own Unreal servers, which didn't help my
game at all, I still sucked at it. The Gub'mint could force the same
thing to cable and fiber, if they desired.

All of which has nothing to do with Net Neutrality. Its a nice side
argument but its not the crux.

Net Neutrality can be summed up as this: You own a bar. Opponents claim
Net Neutrality won't let you have "Ladies Night" since you cannot
discriminate your traffic. Proponents state that Net Neutrality won't
let you hang up a sign that says "No Irish".

(Swap ladies night for VOIP and Irish for Netflix and you get my point.)

Nick




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