-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Rod Beck wrote:
I'll make one comment before 'Alex the Hammer' closes this discussion for straying into politics.
Clearly regulating the incumbents to unbundle local loops has worked very well in some European countries (France and possibly others). Clearly US financial deregulation has cost the world dearly.
So regulation is the appropriate response in some cases (I hope that is clear given the world financial system almost went under a few weeks ago).
I think you're making a faulty logical leap. Regulation to unbundle local loops works (sometimes) because it is a simple regulation that undoes what a previous regulation screwed up in the first place. That said, flattening the regulations to allow others to properly build their own loops would likely be more effective, except from a cost perspective it has a very high barrier to entry - however people could form smaller operations and simply service their community then grow that mesh outwards. That is an option I'd take over LLU far more readily. The issue for me comes from looking at the incumbents position. Many of these were government owned entities that were privatised, and then later in some cases gone to public market ownership. It sets a nasty precedent when you hand a company their privatisation, and then later on start bullying them around at a very high legal level. Those are still laws that apply across all other companies too - and in the worst of cases they are applied across a group of 'license holders' which simply further entrenches their position. Much of this also tends to alert governments to the fact that they are financially incentivised to hold their big money churning incumbents as the tax rewards are greater, and if they are an African government; hell, just force your incumbents to give you shares. So no, regulation is not an appropriate response in some cases, you've only confused it with deregulation, and it's one I'm not convinced about either... -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFJDqyj0FZZWLfHKjURAo4zAJ4od5mGi+OG644nmen+uEr+G6M/vQCfasQZ 7Ivu9l8zT5aMDliGTDZbk24= =jViN -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----