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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

"I'd also like to point out that splitting up Ma Bell hardly solved the problem."

Really ? I'm not an expert, but one item that comes to mind is that my children have never heard the term "long distance" and never will. That's pretty swell.

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"long distance" charges continued for a long time after the split up. I'm not convinced that the splitup was a causal factor at all with regards to those going away.

(As a reference, my most recent landline also had long distance charges just a couple of years ago. Getting unlimited was cost prohibitive relative to the benefit.)

I'd like to argue that splitting up Bell succeeded so utterly that it's time to break up some of the modern incarnations of the Baby Bells.

Agreed. There's a great documentary on this called "Long Distance Warrior". It's about the MCI court case against Ma Bell/ATT.

Was on PBS a while back, but think it's uploaded as a private Youtube video somewhere.

Back in the day, you could make a person to person collect call knowing they would refuse to accept the charges. You would do this to signal that you safely arrived after a long trip...etc. You could also encode information in the name you told the operator was making the call.

Ma Bell's children went on to do the exact same thing with cable and broadband.

So... it sounds like we need to do the exact same thing again.

But you're advocating the opposite. Why?

Separate infrastructure and service. Require companies to sell access to the infrastructure a wholesale price to anybody who wants in. This way it allows for new entrants to the market who can find different ways of packaging the wholesale price at lower cost to the consumer without requiring them to build infrastructure.

(The service part of the infrastructure company pays the same wholesale price as everybody else so that there are no advantages to owning both)

This is the model that a lot of European countries with post privatization telecoms monopolies went with and has worked surprisingly well and has kept prices low.

Or if you are building infrastructure on taxpayer dollar keep it public like they keep almost everything else. Depends on location, but usually power lines are public but maintained by a private contracted company, roads are public but are maintained either by subcontracted engineering corps or state public unionized engineers, sewer lines are public, etc.

It seem we only think that twisted pair / coaxial / fiber channels should cross everyones private property but stay privately owned. On average at least. I know a lot of backwards thinking that leads to the privatization of other infrastructure (water, power, etc) that leads to tremendous exploitation of the citizenry by the monopoly provider.

This is exactly what the Baby Bells are required to do with their lines. This is why you sometimes see small regional DSL providers - they're leasing the lines from the Baby Bell and reselling them.

That might also be why the two companies doing really shady net neutrality stuff are both cable providers rather than DSL providers - the DSL providers wouldn't be able to get away with it.

Breaking up a company will be no means guarantee fair access in any given location.

Broadly speaking we've slowly gotten closer to the monopoly status again which is why we are seeing this now.

http://eon3emfblog.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ATT-Reborn...

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