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To: Steve Robinett who wrote (20750)	6/7/1999 5:06:00 PM
From: Tunica Albuginea	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 41369

My are we sensitive today Steve. I am sorry if I misstated your point. So you said " the Telecommunication act preempts local control ". So what? That Telecom Act applies to telephones; cable TV. It did not apply to the Internet. In 1996 the web was at it's infancy and few were predicting the tremendous upcoming influence of e-commerce.It certainly did not apply to ATT getting back to owning cable going through 60% of US homes. Why don't we just let MSFT have complete control of the Operat.Syst? Or INTC of the microprocessor? The world is full of want to be monopolizers who want to bully their way into your pocket. ATT had a monopoly here and profited handsomely. Had we let it continue we probably would not have had the web today. However we wisely saw the monopoly for what it was and nixed it. Now ATT wants to use the same 100 year old tactics to corner the market. It is not going to happen. We need to have common carrier status for copper, airwaves and cable. If you lay cable you should be entitled to get your money back plus some profit. Just like the phone companies. Now we got all kinds of folks that are laying phone lines: MCI; Sprint;Worldcom. Consumers haven't been hurt as ATT tried to tell us 20 years ago when they were about to be broken up. We are going to have a gazillion people laying fiber optic cable in Portland if it is profitable to do so. I guess ATT thinks it is profitable and wants to go there through TCI and Media One. The only problem with ATT is that it does not want to share in the profits with others.And it is trying to hide their greed by telling us mumbo jumbo like Well "the Portland consumers will be hurt". Or, " We are protected by the Telco act ". Exactly what in all this do you disagree with? An intelligent discussion of this may prove more fruitful than ad hominem attacks. That includes what's wrong with this country, although that is probably best carried out in another thread. Name the place and time, bg, TA You say, the Telecom Act did not give local control to cable as a TV media Did I say it did? Absolutely not. As my post plainly says, the Telecommunication act preempts local control--duh? You seem to think you've got all the answers to what's "wrong" with this country. You might add to your list people who can't read. Best, --Steve