Re: California Declares Free Market Broken, Recommends Price Controls For Phone Services

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Reminds me of the old days in the Bell System. When I arrived at Bell  
Labs we were told (but not asked to believe) that ATT was not a  
monoplogy at all After all there were thousands and thousands of  
telephone Co in the USA!! (they had about 3% of the phones :-) )djf


Begin forwarded message:

From: Lauren Weinstein <lauren () vortex com>
Date: August 16, 2008 5:50:27 PM EDT
To: Brett Glass <brett () lariat net>
Cc: Lauren Weinstein <lauren () vortex com>, dave () farber net
Subject: Re: [IP] Re: California Declares Free Market Broken,  
Recommends Price Controls For Phone Services

When the 2006 dereg was pushed thru here, the telcos promised we
could trust that they wouldn't do exactly what they're now doing.
The CPUC said at the time that if the telcos didn't abide by that,
they would re-regulate.  End of story.

> You've said repeatedly that ISPs are the problem, and are lobbying for
> regulation that would hurt small providers more than large ones.

I have repeatedly said that regulations affecting large ISPs could
(and should) be drawn up to exempt small ISPs in significant ways.
If that's not good enough for ya', sorry.  Large ISPs *are* going to
come under more regulation sooner or later, and if you so badly want
there not to be exemptions for small operations I guess that's your
choice.  But the big boys aren't going to get away with their
current anticompetitive tactics forever.

> > and it's also not representative of the larger ISP industry.
>
> That's incorrect. Small ISPs such as myself outnumber large ones by
> two orders of magnitude. We are the majority.

The majority of WHAT Brett?  Yeah, there are thousands of little
ISPs.  But the top 5 ISPs have 56% share, and the top 10 have 71.5
market share.  All those thousands of others are splitting less than
30%: http://www.isp-planet.com/research/rankings/usa.html

--Lauren--





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