Re: Europe puts pressure on FCC over accounting rate moves

[Tim May <tcmay@got.net>]

At 10:52 PM -0700 9/2/97, Bill Frantz wrote:
>#######################################################
...
>Europe puts pressure on FCC over accounting rate moves
>------------------------------------------------------
>The European Commission (EC) has warned the US regulator, the Federal
>Communications Commission (FCC), that its unilateral action (see TN
>46) could jeopardise the World Trade Organisation agreement on
>telecoms. The FCC has rejected the WTO agreements sanctioned by the
>ITU, and intends to impose its own cost-based accounting tariff for
>international call terminations.
>
>The US suffers an enormous trade deficit in telecoms services
>because its international calls are much cheaper than those in many
>other countries. This means that far more traffic originates in the
>US for termination overseas than comes in from abroad, resulting in
>American international operators paying out more than US$5 billion
>per year to foreign carriers for the termination of calls.
...

The basic flaw in all of these analyses stems from lumping all of these
market transactions together into national bins.

The whole "trade deficit" talk, on all sides, suffers from this fatal flaw.
If Company A in nominal nation AA gets more business than Company B in
nominal nation BB, the pundits call this "imbalanced trade." I call it
knowing where the bargains are.

Can't we spare one of our nukes for Brussels? And another for Cherbourg, or
wherever it is the EC has its other HQ?

(Note to Greg Broiles: You will undoubtedly claim that I should check my
facts more thoroughly before sending this message. When you start paying me
$150 an hour (cheap by attorney's inflated fee schedules) I will promise to
spend an extra 10-20 minutes per post doing Web searches to verify trivial
details.)

--Tim May

There's something wrong when I'm a felon under an increasing number of laws.
Only one response to the key grabbers is warranted: "Death to Tyrants!"
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^1398269     | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."