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Non-Tech : Proposed $.10 per Minute Internet Charge
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To: acell bown who wrote (72)2/10/1997 3:43:00 PM
From: Tom Simpson   of 112
 
I daresay you are right in that the trends will take care of the economics in the fullness of time. In the meantime, Mother Bell still has an "effective" monopoly and is burdened with the responsibilities associated with that position. One of those is to ensure that our daughters don't get busy signals when they call their friends to discuss crucial matters in their lives. Its fair to say that the local loop infrastructure was not designed with Internet connection characteristics in mind and neither were the agorithms for distributing those costs to us. Its plausable that the telcos are having problems sustaining gross "connection-hour" capacity within the loops and the money to address that will have to come from somewhere.
Of course my daughters, who don't use the Internet, say, "Anyone but me....I have the right to talk with my friends for free".

Whats dangerous within this discussion is the ease with which the Constitution is discarded. We cannot permit speech content to be an element used to arbitrate within the debate, neither right hand speech or left hand speech. The filthiest of pornography has the same standing as stock quotes and 10-K's from Edgar. I for one, do not under any circumstances want the phone company (or anyone else) in any way monitoring the content that flows through the copper wires attached to my house. The name for that is wiretapping. The current reality is that there is no distinction between my voice calls and "Internet" calls except that, in the case of the latter, it is my modem that does the speaking. Do we wish to have Mother Bell listening in so as to bill one kind differently from another? This is a very slippery slope.

When and if the cable companies actually do move to supply telephony and network connections (they have been pretty slow out of the box so far), I don't think the constitutional issues go away. The question then will be, "Can your cable company monitor your content?"

Best regards......Tom
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