Re: Choice of ISP

["Shirley Márquez Dúlcey" <user=15@nabble.blu.org>]

 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. 

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