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Free FCC Ringtones: When Is a Monopoly Not a Monopoly?

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I’ve Got a Question

Isn’t a generally accepted principle here in the US that monopolies are pretty much bad things?

I mean it’s something that most folks here seem to agree on regardless of their political persuasion. Those who shade toward the conservative side see competition as beneficial for the economy. And folks with a more liberal outlook generally see behemoth corporations as undesirable.

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And didn’t the US government spend something like 8 years in court to break up the monopoly that AT&T had over out nation’s communication system?

I’m sure they spent a ton of our tax dollars on that.

They Say That Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

Where I lived we weren’t too affected one way or the other by the break up. We happened to live in a very rural part of Upstate New York and our family somewhat affectionately called our local phone company, Taconic Telephone, Rinky-dink Tel. [Read more…]

Net Neutrality 6-26-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

I’ve added these links to the Net Neutrality Page today.

A Simple Net Neutrality Message: It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It

I’m very much an ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ guy.

The Web ain’t broke, not one bit. In fact, it’s thriving, growing by leaps and bounds, producing more cool innovations in a day than you could try out in a year. And the Net has been neutral since its beginnings. . . .

Are You Among The Seven Million?

“Privacy advocates slammed AT&T on Thursday for declaring that it owned its Internet and video customers’ account information and could hand the data over to law enforcement if needed.”

Owned!!! That’s right – owned!!!

Think about this – read this – see this – hear this – know this;

“In the policy update, which applied to AT&T’s more than 7 million Internet and video customers, the company said it could collect usage information from subscribers, including the Web pages they view, the programs they record, and the games they play.”

After they’ve collected that information, they OWN it! They own your information, about you!

And they do wonderful things with the information they own about you;

They Share It

On Monopoly (and a little bit of net neutrality)

The irony is that the people arguing that, say, the government should breakup monopolies in the name of innovation tend to be plagued by a lack of imagination. They couldn’t imagine that anything beyond the desktop OS would matter in computing. If they had seen a future whereby the web might supersede the desktop, they might not have worried. On a personal note, I wouldn’t argue that I have any foresight whatsoever, but hindsight works just fine. Simply looking at history should be enough to realize that one company can’t dominate and seek rents on a market for too long. Simply the act of exploiting a dominant position prompts more effort and energy in the direction of beating it.

And on that note, let me segue into the current arguments about net neutrality, and why I suspect that legislating the principle would be a bad idea. If the telcos really do try to stifle what happens on the internet, there will be a lot of effort put forth to try and circumvent their grip. . . .

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE