[10885] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Two-way Internet service from Continental Cable?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Karl Denninger)
Sun Mar 13 17:35:21 1994
From: karl@mcs.com (Karl Denninger)
To: schoff@psi.com (Martin Lee Schoffstall)
Date: Sun, 13 Mar 1994 12:27:53 -0600 (CST)
Cc: sundar@ai.mit.edu, marty@psilink.com, fidelman@civicnet.org, jmm@merit.edu,
In-Reply-To: <9403131331.AA26359@psi.com> from "Martin Lee Schoffstall" at Mar 13, 94 08:31:31 am
>
> actually the small business service is $400/month, but it doesn't mean
> that it isn't a cutoff for you still.
>
> marty
When is Continental going to open their cable plant up to any and all comers?
Is it going to take an act of Congress, much as I suspect it will with the
telcos? Is PSI's arrangement with them an exclusive? Is there restrictive
language in your contract(s) with them preventing the entry of another
provider on their wires? Given that Continental got their cable plant at
"no risk" due to monopoly franchise agreements, I would (and will, if I
have to) argue that any <exclusive> arrangement of that kind should be
prohibited by law. Note that this would not prohibit a "common carrier"
mentality by Continental -- just one which gives exclusive (or favored)
access to one company.
Is your liason an act to increase competition, or to place another party in
an embedded position with no meaningful competition?
I believe that Congress perhaps ought to look into this deal and others like
it. This is more productive than mandating "flat rate access" to Internet
services by common carriers. No, if Congress has a role here it is to make
damn sure that the monopolists who have reigned for years cannot leverage
their <rate-payer> subsidized physical plant with one or more parties into
severely unfair competitive advantage.
If not we'll just be trading a monopolist position in one technology
for one in another technology. We'll end up with yet another long-distance
phone system where you pay-by-the-byte instead of pay-by-the-minute. And why
not, when its the "cheapest" thing being offered. What those who support
this kind of model don't tell you is that the reason its the cheapest thing
offered is that the barrier to entry for anyone else has been raised
artificially to where its no longer viable to try another pricing model.
Perhaps its time to dust off my "web RF interconnect" technology (which I
designed 5 years ago and discovered that there was insufficient processor
power available at reasonable cost to implement) and see if it can be done
today in one of the "free-for-all" RF bands. THAT would destroy the telco
monopoly overnight (for voice and data); I still believe there is
insufficient bandwidth available to do TV over that medium, but that will
change with time.
Customers who are interested in competition (and I would argue that all
customers of Internet-related technology <should> be interested in this)
should weigh VERY CAREFULLY whether or not this is truly a betterment of
the competitive playing field, and vote with their wallets accordingly.
Cheap now can be expensive later if the result is the lessening of
competition and raising the cost of entry into a marketplace.
--
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Karl Denninger (karl@MCS.COM) | MCSNet - Full Internet Connectivity (shell,
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