DEREGULATION IS NOT THE ANSWER! You give telecoms even an inch & they'll **** you
The answer isn't to demand that they share what they invested in. Just let people lay what they need.
The problem here is not regulation, it's over-regulation -- allowing them to have a monopoly on cable.
Open it up and let people invest or not as they see fit.
Requiring people to let competitors use their lines is a false choice.
The whole point is they ARE NOT THE OWNERS OF THE LINES. In the case of the earliest phone lines, most of them were laid down with the help and funding of the government. Therefore, if the government is investing money to wire the country, then the private companies that are partners in the agreement are bound to the terms of the deal, which in this case meant leasing the lines wholesale to competing companies. The Answer is NOT DEREGULATION. the problem stems from the fact that the damage is already done with MIS-REGULATION and therefore the cable and telephone/DSL incumbents are so embedded in their market, that it would be impossible for someone to compete fairly, hence the whole point of the government assisting the original private companies in the first place.
This also happened on a state level during the 90's when
states invested LITERALLY BILLIONS OF DOLLARS into regional telecom companies to build out a nationwide fiber-optic network for ubiquitous high speed internet (45 mbps bi-directional), similar to the public/private fiber networks that many of our European and Asian friends have created. The states gave these financial handouts in many forms, including
legislation that directly increased their profits (removing price caps, etc) ,
state grants, and
ENORMOUS tax incentives. In addition to that, the telecom lobbyists successfully argued that much more deregulation was needed in order to "free" them to be able to build out these fiber-optic networks, all the time promising a quick build out and cheap and ubiquitous access for the consumers.
After many years of broken promises, contract renegotiations, lawsuits, approved mergers, etc, total funding, which amounts to nearly
$200,000,000,000 has been completely squandered, AND NO ONE HAS BEEN HELD TO ACCOUNT. The politicians changed, the regulations changed, and not one **** person is sitting in prison right now.
WTF!!!
The Nieman Watchdog group at Harvard University says "
In short, the Bell companies gamed the regulatory system: after the state deals went through and the mergers were completed, they simply closed everything, even though they had commitments under state laws ... It is now clear that in most states companies did minimal work, and the public was scammed as a result.
They have a great introductory article written on their website with alot of background information into this **** scam. You can find it here:
http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Ask_this.view&askthisid=186
So next time you
tout the virtues of deregulation and quote philosophical arguments about government intervention, I suggest you look closer at the facts and reality, and leave the Ideology to the Whitehouse and their cronies who are working to destroy this country from the inside out.
