[2039] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Balkanization
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (matsb@sics.se)
Mon Jan 20 09:15:47 1992
To: sean@dsl.pitt.edu (sean mclinden)
Cc: LAWS@ai.sri.com, com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of Mon, 20 Jan 92 07:14:06 -0500.
Date: Mon, 20 Jan 92 15:14:55 +0100
From: matsb@sics.se
The political question is wether to accept the situation or
change it. Most countries have now abandoned the fully state controlled
PTT model (often a monopoly). The options are a regulative situation
or the perfect open market.
I have not seen any perfect open market anywhere yet, if your are big
you have influence, if you have money, you can buy yourself a market,
either direct or by puttng your prizes at the level where your
opponents can't surviwe. So in a user perspective, a well regulated
relative open market would be the ideal, where several companies of
similar size operates.
But there is no ideal world...
--mats
The issue is not how many network companies we have. Sure, we have
something like 400 phone companies. But through Federal mandate (using
various forms of regulation and anti-trust law). You can pretty much
reach everyone using the same interface. And most of what you say
about competition in the phone industry is not really true, anyway.
How many choices of a local carrier do you have? How many choices of
local cable TV do you have?
And I would argue that your competitive model is too shallow. In the
past month of travel I have used one private carrier that would not
accept my billing card and another, along the Pennsylvania Turnpike,
that disabled touch tone after the call was completed in order to
prevent cascade calling. Of couse, this also meant that for 300 miles
(some 6 hours if I stayed with the Federally mandated speed limit),
I couldn't access voice mail at work!
Did I have a choice, here? Was this service better under competition
than it would have been if Bell had provided the phones? It wasn't
even cheaper!
So tell me, who benefited under competition, here?
Sean
