Re: Obama's FCC team?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: David Richardson <dsrich () ieee org>
Date: November 15, 2008 1:47:18 PM EST
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: [IP] Obama's FCC team?

Brett Glass wrote:

[much snipped]
> After a rather laborious hunt, I've managed to find a copy of  
> 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.   
> > In fact, a JP Morgan analyst named Jonathan Chaplin recently made  
> > clear that cable and telephone companies are doing their best to  
> > avoid a price war:
> >
> > "The broadband market is a duopoly," he said. "That should be a  
> > stable pricing environment. It's in their interests to compete  
> > rationally and preserve the economics of the market."
>
> In the remainder of her speech, she continues to harp on this  
> (false) string, claiming again and again that there is only a  
> duopoly in "98% of the country" when in fact competitive ISPs --  
> including WISPs -- serve about that much of it! She seeks, by  
> denying the existence of competitive broadband providers, to advance  
> a regulatory agenda that would in fact greatly harm or even  
> eliminate those providers.
>
> For the full text of her testimony, see
>
> <http://www.openinternetcoalition.org/files/Crawford_Testimony.pdf>
>
> --Brett Glass

Mr. Glass continues to pretend that the independent ISPs with which he  
associates himself are in any real sense competing with the duopoly  
providers, but none of the independents that I know of can supply more  
than a vanishingly small fraction of the data rates and/or services  
that the main-line providers supply.  Their continued existence  
depends solely on the fact that they serve a market that is too small  
and/or diffuse for the bigger providers to bother with.

As an end-user I would truly appreciate some _real_ competition, but  
the stranglehold that the cable and telco types have on the end-user  
market appears to be getting worse, not better, so  I have to think  
that Ms. Crawford's testimony covers my case accurately.

--
David Richardson   \   Imagine Whirled Peas
dsrich () ieee org     \
These are my opinions - nobody else wants them.





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