It almost seems like Deborah Platt Majoras, the FTC’s Republican chairman, is joining the millions of people in the United States who aren’t happy that Bell South, Comcast, Time-Warner Cable, AT&T, SBC and Verizon are continuing their neverending quest to wall off their gardens.
I ask myself whether consumers will stand for an Internet that suddenly imposes restrictions on their ability to freely explore the Internet or does not provide for the choices they want,” Deborah Platt Majoras, the FTC’s Republican chairman, told a luncheon audience.
Unfortunately, like Ted Stevens, Majoras believes that Telcos should be able to do whatever they want. She believes Net Neutrality provisions would regulate an industry that should be able to operate within a free market. Naively, she believes that Big Telecom will actually provide the choices we want.
We are not standing for it
When you have a regulated monopoly in charge of the wires entering my house, how exactly does a free market work? How exactly should I proceed if my cable company AND my phone company both deliver high-priced, poor quality products? Free market principles dictate that I should buy from a competitor. But wait, there are no competitors anymore. If I don’t buy their products at all, Big Telecom whines that they can’t improve service without subsidies from the government and that they should be able to hobble competitors products coming in over the lines I pay for. If I buy their crap products, then I’m a chump.
Big Telecom opposes a free market on the wires to your home
Big Telecom already makes tons of profit on their lines. They sell voicemail, phone service plus DSL on wires that were installed when Nixon was President (or before)…wires paid for under the protection of a regulated monopoly?…hmm, I think they’re doing alright. Big Telecom is after something else: they really believe they can be AOL or Google. If you’re finished laughing, pick yourself up off the floor and read on.
I’d like to tell a story called:
What if other industries follow the Big Telecom model?
Imagine an electric company whose sole job is to provide electrical service to my home. For the use of their wires and the power carried on them, I pay a monthly bill. Now my electric company suddenly decides that just owning wires and delivering power is too boring and not profitable enough. Brilliantly arrogant, they begin to resell washing machines, stoves, water heaters and air-conditioners, too. But despite all their efforts to pretend to be an appliance retailer, most people don’t trust the electric company to sell appliances (sorry gas stove lovers, we only have electric here) and prefer getting their large appliances from Sears or Best Buy.
The electric company, bitter about the power of the fickle consumer, decides on a killer strategy to bolster their dying appliance market. If I want to use appliances I get from Sears or Best Buy, they’re going to charge me a penalty on my monthly bill–not because my Sears appliances use more power or they’re not getting paid for the electricity I’ve used. But because the competition within the marketplace is hurting their strategy to sell appliances.
Now to bolster their case, electric companies around the United States band together, pay loads of money to the politicians to try and create laws that would enforce and legalize their right to charge me extra for my use competitors’ products. They call my efforts to codify in law my right to use the electrical wires I already pay for freely with whatever appliances I want, “government regulation”, “anti-competition” and suggest that the poor electric company is being trod on by Sears and Best Buy.
“Sears is getting a free ride. They sell products that use electricity, but they don’t pay a cent in electric bills. Right now, Kenmore is probably developing even more sophisticated refrigerators that use electricity and they expect us to upgrade wires to the home to provide more power?” The electric companies suggest that Sears and Best Buy, as providers of stuff that uses power, should have to pay some of the bills for the electricity, too.
How friggin’ stupid to the Telecoms think we are?
The Telcos and Cable Giants believe its their turn to be AOL, their turn to create a massive AOL-Effect, their turn to use their monopoly to build a virtual biodome around their customers and to shape the customers’ experiences. They hope that eventually customers won’t even realize that they’ve been surfing in a big Telco-maintained dome, not out in the real Internet. AOL made a lot of money this way for a while (until the Telcos sought help from politicians and the Supreme Court to prevent competitors from having access to their DSL and cable systems, virtually decimating every single ISP that didn’t have government sponsored wires, e.g. AOL, MSN, Netzero and Earthlink). Now that they’ve sought and received government intervention to prevent competition on municipally-sponsored wires, Big Telecom believes its their time.
Big Telecom has thrown the competitors off our wires and now they want the content providers off, too, unless those content providers want to pay again for bandwidth I already pay for. It’s as simple as that.