[11832] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Telecomm regulation
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ira Brodsky (via RadioMail))
Thu Apr 21 16:58:48 1994
Date: Thu, 21 Apr 1994 09:08:26 PDT
From: Ira Brodsky (via RadioMail) <brodsky@radiomail.net>
Cc: com-priv@psi.com, frezza@radiomail.net, stahlman@radiomail.net
To: mech@eff.org
Stanton,
It all seems to boil down to two
key points.
You decry the mess regulation has
created in telecomm, but you want to
'fix' it with... more regulation.
Don't you realise that everyone--
even the regulators--claims to be in favor of 'streamlined' regulations
with 'limited' objectives?
Regulation, by its very nature, can't
restore competition. Competition is
the ability to respond--in real time--
to market dynamics and the actions of
competitors. Regulation, in contrast,
attempts to 'freeze frame' everything
into the bureaucrats' idea of a 'fair'
balance of forces.
Regulation in telecomm is guaranteed
to be obsolete before the ink is dry. In the world of rapidly evolving
technology, you can never create a
balance of forces that can survive
more than a few weeks.
Where you trust new, better regulation
to 'fix' the mess created by regulation, I trust technology. We
can have competition in the local loop if wireless and Cable TV and long distance carriers and who-knows-who are free to just go to it. The govt. says
it approves of this new reality (created by technological advances),
but they respond by regulating Cable,
quashing the AT&T-McCaw merger, and by creating a PCS with all sorts of eligibility restrictios, taxes disguised as auctions, and even an
affirmative action program for divvying
up the channels. (At this rate, PCS
will be stillborn.)
Your views re: corporations are completely out of step with what has
happened since the invention of the
microprocessor. Large corporations
are downsizing in every sense. All
of the growth in jobs during the 80's
was in small business. But not so
in Europe, where the idea that
corporations are evil and must be curbed has, ironically, led to a situation (as I predict it would here)
in which there are precious few start-up firms. Guess what? Only the
large corporations can afford to pay
the taxes and provide the mandated
'human, caring' benefit programs. And only large corporations can afford to
cultivate the industry-government
alliance to ensure they are on the
receiving end of govt. subsidies.
Don't you see? This country already
has the national info infrastructure, health care system, and consumer-oriented society that the rest of the world envies. The NII is an attempt to duplicate the govt.-knows-best policies that have failed miserably in Western
Europe. Why follow a bad model?
Ira Brodsky
