Re: Obama's FCC team?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Ed Gerck <egerck () safevote com>
Date: November 15, 2008 12:51:26 PM EST
To: dave () farber net
Cc: ip <ip () v2 listbox com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Obama's FCC team?

[Dave: Greetings and hope to see at least some of your views in the  
new FCC! For IP if you wish.]
> Susan's testimony online. The hearing was before the Antitrust Task  
> Force of the House (not Senate; my mistake) Judiciary Committee, on  
> March 11th, 2008. She says:
>
> > You might be thinking that the market will ensure that a non- 
> > discriminatory provider of Internet access will arrive on the scene  
> > if that is what users want.  But we do not have a functioning  
> > competitive market for Internet access.  Instead, we have regional  
> > duopolies (usually one cable provider and one telco) providing  
> > Internet access to 98% of the country.  Prices are not going down  
> > and nondiscriminatory Internet access services are not available.

The skeptical question is not even what we have in the US today but  
why do we continue to have pretty much the /same/ situation that we  
had seven years ago? We have no horizon, no credible anticipation of  
improvement. There has been no evolution for the customer, even though  
our needs today are vastly larger than seven years ago even if we do  
not put HD into the mix just yet.

What Susan described is the situation in La Jolla, Calif. It is  
likewise in Marin County, Calif. and in other places I personally have  
experienced. Recently, the telco that serves La Jolla had a week long  
outage in my area and with no financial compensation; they also  
recently changed their terms of service with the recourse of  
discontinuing service if the customer does not agree (this was put in  
writing). Meanwhile, we are stuck with less than 3Mb using DSL (where  
one can have fixed IP and servers), or a much higher price for not  
much better service.

Best regards,
Ed Gerck
<www.gerck.com>





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