For years, the phone company has been able to leverage its monopoly over the market and force people to buy services from it rather than competing in an open and free market. For instance, with only one phone provider they could charge whatever they wanted for long distance. Now that I can buy my services on the outside of my Internet connection, I can use Vonage over the Internet and pay less for local and long distance than I paid for just a standard analog line from Bell before the Internet. The phone company hates this and wants an Internet that allows them to sell services from the inside of the network at inflated prices. In other words, they cannot compete in a free market and want to use the legal system in this country to stifle competition, creativity and progress. A prominent telephone company executive recently said home users don’t need more than 1 megabit of bandwidth to the public Internet. I’ve had more than that since 2000! The only explanation for this is that the executive in question sees the Internet as useless and intends for us to buy all our services from him. This backwards-leaning look at technology is proof positive that the telephone companies (and now cable operators) in this country do not want technology to advance and in fact want to bring us back into the dark ages so they do not have to compete in the new economy.
June 13, 2006