On 4/25/2014 8:23 AM, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
gulation to protect its monopoly power.
I answered in a private message: Microsoft.
Kinda obvious if you think about it for, oh, say, 12 microseconds.
The government actually had to step in to hinder them, as I recall,
though I believe it was pointless. Relatively speaking, Microsoft had a
short run monopoly if you want to call it that. They definitely had the
market share. With the introduction of the smartphone and the tablet,
people have required more versatile applications which tend to work
across multiple devices. In this regard, I believe Apple won. Internet
growth and consumer education have also altered market share. The money
filtering into open source has fueled a lot of growth in software
development and allowed a lot more flexibility. The change to OSX and
x86 on Apple's part along with google and redhat's efforts have altered
the playing field permanently.
Which were "Anyone afraid what will happen when companies which have monopolies can charge content
providers or guarantee packet loss?" and "How is this good for the consumer?" and "How is
this good for the market?"
My answer was an attempt to say that if you don't have any government entities allowing and
protecting (two pretty much interchangeable terms, I prefer the latter) monopolies the answer to
the first question is "Huh? What?" and to the second and third "Best service for
the best price is pretty good for everybody. Except the losers that can't rip you off without the
FCC protection."
While it is probably true that the gov't had a hand in the fact I have exactly
one BB provider at my home, I am not even closed to convinced that a purely
open market would not have resulted in the same problem. But thanx for pointing
out an answer I probably missed.
In Oklahoma, I've watched WISPs take money from the various grants for
under-served areas. They love to move into small cities and those cities
are happy to have them. Their plan is well thought out. They know
exactly how fast the telco will move to increase speeds and drop the
requirement that you must also pay for a phone line (which the telco was
just using to pull in extra money on the backside until the FCC finally
changes that funding). The prices suddenly drop in the town. It's not
the best service for either party, but it is at least more affordable.
The one that pisses me off is when ILECs use grant money strictly to try
and wipe out their competition. It creates a very bad environment, where
one company must use grants for the same area as another company just to
stay competitive. I don't mind all these funds and all, but there needs
to be much more oversight on how the funding is used. "underserved" is
too broad, and the grants get used in anti-competitive practices against
companies that don't pull money from the government. In addition, I too
often see companies that have used grants not lower their prices,
provide more jobs, or increase their bandwidth offerings. I hear
corporate jet fuel is costly, though.
We still have huge areas of land that have little or no affordable
broadband capability. These are areas that it isn't profitable to buy
the equipment to serve and where grant money would do the most good to
allow sustainable growth. What I've been pondering is the creation of
non-profit ISPs, where the purpose is to actually serve the people who
won't make you millions at cost.
Jack
