As part of AT&T’s Astroturf plan to monopolize the Internet and blackmail all its users, it has had two of the Internet’s "inventors," Dave Farber (right) and Michael Katz, produce an anti-net neutrality screed in The Washington Post.
In this column, Farber and Katz make the extraordinary claim that legislating fairness on the Internet would reduce innovation, as though monopolists were capable of such things.
Following is my response, which I tried to share with Farber’s list:
I’m not at all surprised that some engineers like Kahn (and Farber) might oppose an
anti-trust solution to the problems of the Bell monopoly.
They’re not
lawyers. By and large, they shun policy. They seek engineering solutions to problems, and can’t imagine political or economic interference being
anything more than a nuisance.
If the U.S. had a competitive
telecommunications market, as envisioned by the 1996 Telecommunications Act,
I’d agree with them 100%.
But we don’t. The Bell System has been put
back together. And this time, without the regulations or requirements of its
first incarnation 100 years ago.
The right solution is to break up the
Bell System again, or to at least separate the provision of bits from the
selling of the service associated with those bits, as is done in Europe and
everywhere else that copied our 1990s model of regulation.
Yes,
network neutrality is just a slogan.
No, it’s not an optimal solution.
Yes,
we’re playing on a field created by Ed Whitacre of AT&T, whose threat to
blackmail successful sites, married to the success of this scheme in
cellular (whose growth lags the rest of the world as a direct result) began
the current controversy.
It’s wrong to assume engineers like Mr. Kahn
know or care about such things.
But someone must. Otherwise, the U.S.
Internet economy will fall as far behind the rest of the world as our
cellular economy already has.
As someone who has worked as an engineer for the bad guys in this story, I agree with you 100%.
As someone who has worked as an engineer for the bad guys in this story, I agree with you 100%.
Nice thesis of conflict you have going. Without a bad guy like Ed Whitaker and “shills” like Farber and Katz (who is Kahn?), you have no argument.
Jesse, my Dad was an engineer/manager with the old phone company, then spun to Pacific Bell, etc. The old phone company paid him a great salary which bought me a nice education. I even got to work there one summer doing cost model for (then) high speed offerings. Regulation turned the accounting of that place into something that the worst interpretation of SOX could never hope, in its most evil dreams, to achieve. There were disincentives for all the wrong things, and armies of people walking around trying to make them all balance out for the regulators. The information mess kept prices much higher than they needed to be and made the companies sluggish performers.
Dana, when you advocate reregulation you are doing two things. (1) You are advocating government-enforced stupidity. Dilbert the comic spawned from an RBOC. (2) You are saying that you distrust consumers to just say no. I could say no to AT&T today with no problem whatsoever. If I want landline service, I can go to Cox (the local cable franchise). In many states that have enacted franchise reform, I may have a choice among multiple cable and phone companies, not just among a single representative of each technology. Regulation takes the whole economy bass ackwards. Competition among willing entrants takes it forward.
Nice thesis of conflict you have going. Without a bad guy like Ed Whitaker and “shills” like Farber and Katz (who is Kahn?), you have no argument.
Jesse, my Dad was an engineer/manager with the old phone company, then spun to Pacific Bell, etc. The old phone company paid him a great salary which bought me a nice education. I even got to work there one summer doing cost model for (then) high speed offerings. Regulation turned the accounting of that place into something that the worst interpretation of SOX could never hope, in its most evil dreams, to achieve. There were disincentives for all the wrong things, and armies of people walking around trying to make them all balance out for the regulators. The information mess kept prices much higher than they needed to be and made the companies sluggish performers.
Dana, when you advocate reregulation you are doing two things. (1) You are advocating government-enforced stupidity. Dilbert the comic spawned from an RBOC. (2) You are saying that you distrust consumers to just say no. I could say no to AT&T today with no problem whatsoever. If I want landline service, I can go to Cox (the local cable franchise). In many states that have enacted franchise reform, I may have a choice among multiple cable and phone companies, not just among a single representative of each technology. Regulation takes the whole economy bass ackwards. Competition among willing entrants takes it forward.
Please. Before the breakup, Bell was no shining example of the free market at its best — more like the exact opposite. It was a nasty monopoly that treated its customers like crap and the government did well to break it up. Treating your own employees well is commendable, but not the only factor in determining if one is a good corporate citizen. People loved working at Enron . . . Besides, if your father took a look at how AT&T and Verizon treat their employees now, I doubt he’d be too impressed.
While one can debate the merits of any given regulation, it is pretty much proven that regulation as a concept is both useful and necessary. What amazes me is that anti-trust, which started out as a way to preserve the free-market is now viewed by man so-called conservatives as a socialist policy. Neither AT&T nor Verizon may have a majority of customers on a national basis but look at their market power in their own territories. Offering up the single cable company that some (not all households are passed by cable as there was never carrier of last resort regulation in that industry) customers have as a choice for telecom as a sign that there is healthy competition is laughable. While an oligopoly may be slightly better than a monopoly it is hardly a competitive market.
Please. Before the breakup, Bell was no shining example of the free market at its best — more like the exact opposite. It was a nasty monopoly that treated its customers like crap and the government did well to break it up. Treating your own employees well is commendable, but not the only factor in determining if one is a good corporate citizen. People loved working at Enron . . . Besides, if your father took a look at how AT&T and Verizon treat their employees now, I doubt he’d be too impressed.
While one can debate the merits of any given regulation, it is pretty much proven that regulation as a concept is both useful and necessary. What amazes me is that anti-trust, which started out as a way to preserve the free-market is now viewed by man so-called conservatives as a socialist policy. Neither AT&T nor Verizon may have a majority of customers on a national basis but look at their market power in their own territories. Offering up the single cable company that some (not all households are passed by cable as there was never carrier of last resort regulation in that industry) customers have as a choice for telecom as a sign that there is healthy competition is laughable. While an oligopoly may be slightly better than a monopoly it is hardly a competitive market.