Senator wants to ban 'fast lane' for Web

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Natural monopolies

"Not invented here" is an American expression,which might serve to urge you to finally look elsewhere in the world for solutions too.

The "last mile wire" serves as a natural monopoly. According to the Worldbank you first and foremost regulate natural monopolies before even considering to privatize these.

That's exactly why the communication regulator (OPTA) forced the incumbent Telco (KPN in the Netherlands) to provide access to any other other service provider at equal terms as KPN itself. That really kickstarted competition and drove down prices.

This approach to natural monopolies is also embedded in the European commision's regulatory framework for other utilities as energy. Contrast that to that catastrophic and ill fated approach to liberalization of the power market in the USA. You really should have considered to study for example the Scandanevian Nordpool instead, that would have saved the USA a lot of trouble (Enron of course but also having to start all over again with developing a Standard Market Design a captal destruction of all those following that illussionistic business model of Enron. In Europe we have seen them all arriving in 2000 and leave soon after the Enron collapse.

Clearly calling some playing field a market is only the beginning. Maintaining a fuctioning market over time which serves society is the real challenge.

It is sad to see that a country as the US of America, which advertizes itself as a very competitive forward looking society, simply seems to lack the conceptual framework to tackle these matters while balancing the interest of society overall and the corporations involved.

It seems that in the USA political/lobby links to industry prevail over broader interest of society and continues to allow private natural monopolies to fully exploit their position at society's cost.

On might realize that the corporation is only an instrument which your society choosed to create within a proper legal framework. That instrument though self serving only, was created as an efficient instrument to organize resources, which in the end serves that society too. However that still leaves the right (and the obligation to law makers) to correct business practises which run counter to the interest of that society.

The title of this article is misleading. Who on earth would oppose something which is faster and presumebly better?

It should have read: "Senator wants to maintain a level playing field" or "Senator calls selective slow down of service providers not affiliated to incumbent monopolist as illegal and unfair business practises"

The USA through DARPA made a great contribution to the Net. However allowing such unfair business practises has already caused the US society a great deal of damage. Access to the Net is in my opinion too important to have the unfair business practises of an incumbent monopolistic Telco to interfer...

Posted by: Joep.Rijntjes@...   Posted on: 03/03/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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