Re: Choice of ISP

["Randy Cole" <user=55@nabble.blu.org>]

 Mark J. Dulcey wrote: 
> David Kramer wrote: 
>> They have no motivation to maintain my copper.  They hate copper and 
>> want to move everyone over to FiOS. 
> What really needs to happen is a change in regulations. The phone 
> company should be required to resell fiber services, just as they are 
> required to resell copper services. To make the landscape fair, the 
> cable companies should also be required to resell their carriage 
> services. 
> 
> The real reason they want to migrate people to FIOS is that once they 
> do, Verizon pwns you. Right now, they have an incentive to offer poor 
> service to copper customers in order to move them from a regulated 
> service to an unregulated service. If you have no Verizon copper 
> coming to your house, you are cut off from all alternative telephone 
> and internet providers other than cable; a duopoly in most locations 
> rather than a monopoly (a few places around here have RCN available as 
> a second cable company), but still very bad for the consumer. 
> 
> If I were determining the policies, I'd go farther and separate the 
> carriage and content businesses; that is, the company that wires your 
> house would NOT BE ABLE to sell you television or internet services, 
> only provide the conduit for other people to sell you those services. 
> But I don't expect to see Washington to do anything of the sort within 
> my lifetime. 
> 
> And yes, I would also bar television and radio networks from owning 
> broadcast stations. I think the FCC actually had a lot of things right 
> back in the 60s and they have gone astray since. But I know that is a 
> minority opinion, and that there is a LOT of money on the other side. 
> 
> That's why I believe the net neutrality fight is so important. We may 
> have already lost the war in old media, but we have the opportunity 
> not to repeat our historical mistakes on the internet. If ISPs can't 
> provide content, can't have ownership in content companies, and can't 
> make financial deals with content companies, then they have no 
> incentive to prefer one type or provider of content over another, and 
> we will have the opportunity for new content providers to exist and 
> flourish.