Re: Level 3's side of the story

[John Curran <jcurran () istaff org>]

At 11:52 PM -0400 10/7/05, Christian Kuhtz wrote:
> Sorry, I fundamentally disagree with the point of view that we need to regulate free entry & free exit and throw these 
> basic tenets of our economy out the window to encourage continued poor decision making .

I'm not advocating that we need to regulate anything, only pointing out that the historic public policy position 
discourages service impacts to 3rd parties, and even more so when done without notice.  If you carry essential consumer 
services, then there is already existing policy in this area.

> There is no paradise behind that door.  And I don't believe regulation should be used to prevent people from making 
> occasionally poor decisions, which in turn will ultimately do nothing more than raise the price floor and create 
> additional barriers of entry in the market.  If you don't have those events happen, bad things never get weeded out.  
> There really is nothing but bad news in store for what you propose, because it isn't as simple of a thing to impose 
> regulation and have mostly good things happen.

That's a fine set of beliefs (and I might even agree with some of them).  However, they're completely irrelevant to the 
existing school of thought which is guiding policy and legislation in this area, which is probably best represented by 
last month's House Telecom committee draft: 

<http://energycommerce.house.gov/108/News/09152005_staff_disc.pdf>   [1]

There you go: mandatory ISP registration, interconnection, consumer protection, and more.  Maybe these folks were too 
busy with other stuff to notice the Internet partition happen earlier in the week?  Oh, wait, I remember now: these 
folks are only matter when legislating.

/John

[1] A readable (only-slightly-biased) summary:  <http://www.heritage.org/Research/Regulation/wm860.cfm>