Re: potpourri (Re: Clearwire May Block VoIP Competitors )

[Paul Vixie <vixie () vix com>]

thegameiam () yahoo com (David Barak) writes:

> > sure as hell, we'll see laws requiring every home to have a telephone,
> > to have that telephone in the kitchen or other main room of the home,
> > and to be clearly marked.  then the POTS tithe comes back, it'll be
> > with vengeance.
>
> So given that you see this as likely, and by your tone, I'm guessing that
> you're not in favor of this outcome, what do you propose?

i propose that if a gov't is going to mandate something, that they be
required to ensure competition for the revenue thus enabled, or they be
required to provide it in a not-for-profit manner (like water and sewage).

again-- i like 911 and i love my local fire department.  what i do not
love is protectionism for capital inertia, in the form of selectively
enforced regulations (like 911).

one of the reasons i like open source so much is that people will only run
BIND9 (et al) if they think it's the best way to solve their problem, and
one of the alternatives that's always available is "code fork!".  this
tends to make for responsiveness on the part of vendors.  and while i've
been heard to quibble about some of the restrictive aspects of GPL (vs BSD),
the same is true of emacs, gcc, linux, freebsd, and everything else i use.

i want that kind of alternative available for my voice communications or
indeed anything i spend money on.  911 is to POTS as MSIE is to Windows--
it helps put the "lock" in "lock-in".
-- 
Paul Vixie