Re: Should we oppose the Data Superhighway/NII?

[Stanton McCandlish <mech@eff.org>]

> Wouldn't the solution then be to eliminate the capacity of local
> municipalities to grant cable monopolies? Fiber is compact -- five or
> even twenty cable companies could coexist happily in New York (where I
> live) if the city didn't grant "franchises", which it charges
> exhorbitantly for. With large scale competition between cable
> companies, monopolies would no longer be a problem.

That's certainly part of it, though not part of the immediate EFF Open
Platform initiative, which is more national in scope.  This "franchise"
problem is a local matter, and would best be handled by local
organizations.  If you are really concerned with this, try contacting the
Society for Electronic Access (SEA), since you live in NYC.  They may
already be working on this, though I cannot of course vouch for them.
Mailing simona@sea.org or simona@panix.com should put you in touch with
them. 

> > In order to get to a world in which free markets can meet our demand for
> > high-bandwidth connectivity, we have to dig ourselves out from the 
> > market-failure position we're in now.
> 
> Isn't the problem in question the result of government granted,
> rather than natural, monopolies? Isn't it thus wrong to call it a
> "market failure"? Seems more like yet another government failure.

Why would a "natural monopoly" be any better?  This is a rather moot
point. The problem here is that such monopolistic entities, whatever their
provenance, don't give a rat's ass for whether or not you want a lot of
bandwidth for multimedia email, or whatever.  Left to their own devices,
they'll happly feed you 5000 channels of tv, plus perhaps some
oh-so-interactive teleshopping clubs and the like.

Part of the effort that must be made is to knock some sense into the
rapidly merging entertainment/information/telecom conglomerates, and try
to at very least keep a large section of the "data highway" (or whatever
one chooses to call it) an Internet-like many-to-many communications
medium, if not fused with Internet itself.  Convincing the govt. of this
is will also take some doing.  One certainly can't IGNORE the govt.  No
matter how much we may wish it'd just go away, it won't, and has to be
dealt with.

-- 
Stanton  McCandlish  mech@eff.org  1:109/1103   EFF  Online  Activist & SysOp
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