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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Feraldo who wrote (167935)	8/6/2001 10:48:02 AM
From: Feraldo	Respond to of 769670

Actually one minor correction, the downfall of Napster and the push to get rid of the other services that are similar might be the only real policy that changed the net (at least policy by the courts). Then again, most of the Napster users were college students with broadband already installed. Music delivered to your house whenever you want it from whatever band you want would have really helped the last mile. Sadly, most of the non college age people I talk to barely realize what napster delivered. The MP3 file was something beyond their realm of knowledge.

To: Feraldo who wrote (167935)	8/6/2001 10:51:08 AM
From: Zoltan!	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Gilder lays the blame squarely on Clinton's regulators, at the FCC, FTC and Antitrust: ...Essential to the Internet economy is the expectation of a steady increase in the speed and capacity of connections. Nearly every dot-com was betting on it. The glitches and delays of dial-up modems abort 70% of all intended Internet transactions and bar the business plans of thousands of dot-coms and Internet service providers, not to mention vendors of streaming video, distance learning, video telecommunications and Internet malls. The only reason for the so-called "fiber optics glut" is the near deliberate starvation of connections to homes and small businesses. It is a classic socialist famine, where the warehouses are full but the people are starving for lack of market distribution systems. Part of this is because of a few poor business decisions in the industry, but most of it comes down to intrusive regulatory policy in an era of deflation. Typical of bad regulation is a Federal Communications Commission policy called Total Element Long Run Incremental Costs, or Telric, summed up simply as a price cap on what telephone companies can charge for links to homes and businesses. Designed in the late 1990s to prevent "monopoly rents," the cap is based on an estimate of costs that would apply in a fully competitive environment when bandwidth is a commodity. But in dynamic technology markets such as Internet broadband, monopolies are inevitable, virtuous and fleeting. Every innovation creates a monopoly at the outset, and monopoly rents pay for financial risks and costs entailed in bringing innovation to market. Like any price-control scheme, Telric choked off supply, taking the profits out of the multibillion-dollar venture of deploying new broadband pipes. Compounding Telric were "open access" and "unbundling" rules that require companies installing advanced Internet gear to share pipes with others. The goal was to stop monopolies, but what regulators did was to bar Internet investment by privatizing the risks and socializing the rewards. No entrepreneurs will invest in risky, technically exacting new infrastructure when they must share it with rivals. At first restricted to telcos, the open-access rules have since been extended to cable, where they balked Michael Armstrong's bold AT&T plan to compete with the Bell companies using cable TV plant. The absence of broadband local loops also withers the optical Internet. The $44.8 billion write-off and $8 billion loss announced last week by JDS Uniphase signals the devastation of the most promising communications technology in the history of the planet. Treating JDS Uniphase as a budding monopoly, the Federal Trade Commission permitted its merger with SDL only on condition that it sell its Rushlikon pump laser facility to Nortel. Some monopoly. Uniphase last week devalued its SDL pump laser acquisition by some $35 billion. The write-off -- the largest in business history -- was partly because of the collapse of last-mile traffic growth. But it was also because an efflorescence of new laser and amplifier technologies -- from such companies as NP Photonics and Princeton Optronics -- are already making conventional pump lasers obsolete. Regulators can't keep up. Before the FTC attack on Uniphase, regulators casually destroyed the Internet strategy of WorldCom. Under Bernie Ebbers, Worldcom planned an attack on the real telopolies around the globe through the use of Internet for both data and voice. Suffering from mazes of conflicting connections, with each data packet making some 17 hops between routers before reaching its destination, today's Internet competes only fitfully with the telecom establishment. But by purchasing and upgrading the Internet facilities of MCI and Sprint, WorldCom planned to transform its portions of the Internet into a coherent broadband system. Instead, upholding the fantastical view that WorldCom was becoming an Internet monopolist, U.S. regulators defended the existing monopolists against the WorldCom challenge, forcing the sale of MCI's Internet facility to Cable & Wireless in Britain and barring the acquisition of the Sprint network. By upholding a false notion of competition -- one in which no one can win or make any money -- the FTC largely wrecked WorldCom, the most aggressive monopoly buster on the planet... interactive.wsj.com