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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: aladin who wrote (18241)	12/7/2006 9:49:38 AM
From: axial	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 46821

"Illustrate this by some means other than self-serving government or corporate press releases." Good tactic. Put the onus on your opponent to supply factual information, when you have none to offer yourself. Accompany the tactic with prejudicial comments about anticipated responses. However, the tactic is not relevant to the matter, so I'll get back to this a little later. "I know its popular here to blame everything on ILEC's and MSO's... " I can't speak for others. My posts have always placed the *fundamental* blame on the absence of good policy. The behaviour of incumbents around the world is consistent within that absence, and almost uniform: exclude competition, maintain scarcity in throughput. On the other hand, where lawmakers have actively intervened, incumbents have been forced to include competitive alternatives. Aggregate thoughput has increased, at a huge discount to previous prices, per bit. So your statement: "Don't be so quick to discount market forces and lack of Government direction" is exactly what I'm NOT doing. I'm ADVOCATING government direction, and use of market forces. That's called the Straw Man: another rhetorical trick where you create a fictitious argument by your opponent, then refute it. The fact is you're supporting my proposition, however unintentionally. "Government subsidies creating new markets do not necessarily achieve what you are suggesting." A carefully-worded statement. "Not necessarily": meaning that in some cases government assistance can help create new markets? Of course it can. Railways would never have been built without government assistance. Look at all the assistance that was given to airlines. Goverment subsidies won't create new markets? First, let's define subsidies. Is the creation of a monopoly a subsidy? The ability to exclude competition and create artificial scarcity is a subsidy, in itself. Who needs government money, when you have a license to print your own? But beyond that, is it true that incumbents have received NO money (subsidies) for broadband buildout? I suggest you check your facts. And finally, define "new markets". Public support for airlines, highways and railways not only opened up new markets in themselves, but also created large new domestic and international industries for these technologies, by virtue of leadership in the field. "The first push at 'broadband access' was with ISDN and what did that get the Japanese? There were dozens of articles in all the trade rags for years about the supposed advantages the Japanese were getting, but essentially they got nothing for it and saddled NTT with substantial debt overhead". DT made the same mistake. Perhaps your example demonstrates retrograde thinking, and the inability of incumbents to encompass and enable new technology. Certainly, fibre was waiting in the wings when ISDN was being pushed by incumbents. I'll post a few links to some of the "factual information" you demanded, in my next 2 posts. I apologise for the rough format, but time is limited. I'm not sure whether you want an honest debate on the questions at hand. I'm willing to continue the discussion. oreillynet.com Regards, Jim

To: aladin who wrote (18241)	12/7/2006 2:24:55 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

I'm enjoying sitting on the sidelines for the moment, enjoying the volleying taking place between aladin and Jim. I can't help pointing out, however an interesting statement aladin made in the uplinked message, because it reverses the commonly-perceived stimulus-response orderings of top-down and bottom-up architectures and economic models associated with telecoms. Aladin stated: "Historically top-down approaches are invariably beaten by bottom-up market forces." In the foregoing, aladin equates top-down with Jim's policy-driven direction used to stimulate "broadband" delivery. At the same time he is referring to "bottom up" as free market-driven forces, which historically have been viewed, where telecoms has been concerned, as the quintessential example of what a top-down, authoritarian regime is all about. In highlighting these juxtopositions it should become obvious that network models, as characterized by both their architectural and economic underpinnings, cannot be neatly packaged, or taxonomized, into binary terms of A and B that remain constants, at least not across different time periods, since they tend to be temporal, only, meaning the significance of each tends to change based on prevailing externalities of the times. How is it that a pre-1984 RBOC with monopoly status could be viewed as a top-down player, only to suddenly be transformed overnight to a bottom-up contender when the market was opened up to full competition? Was it reasonable to expect that the cultural foundations and business instincts of large monopolies would be modified in any significant way based on a court decree? "Market driven" models could range the entire gamut, from total chaos to complete order, mimicking both the Internet and the PSTN (using these terms for their literal and metaphorical qualities), respectively, and the same could be stated about government policy-driven frameworks, although the latter more often than not tend to mirror the rigid, centrally controlled models of traditional telecoms. So, where do freenets and community-inspired (grass-roots) networks fit into these categories? Again, there is no rule, since some align with the top-down model, and others bottom-up model. The question becomes, to which top-down and bottom-up models are we referring?