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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (15376)	3/25/2010 12:59:00 PM
From: RetiredNow	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

That's not always true that market forces will automatically drive up bandwidth speeds. I would argue that in the current government policy regime, market forces are being restrained from driving up bandwidth speeds. For example, the lack of competition in the cable set top box market. Why do you think we lack competition there? It's government policy that gives cable companies a de facto monopoly on that. The FCC wants to create new rules to break that monopoly. Another example is my own situation. I literally cannot buy speeds higher than 7 Mbps download and 488K upload in my area, unless I want to pay $150 per month for a business line. Why? Lack of competition. Government rules have made it difficult for other competitors like Verizon's FiOS and AT&T's U-Verse to get here quickly and compete. They have a city by city patchwork of rules to contend with, instead of a Federal standard. That means SLOOOOOWWWW rollouts. So the main role for the government I'm advocating here is to break down the barriers to competition that they themselves have created by created Federal standards that all states have to comply with, so that the market is unleashed to drive up bandwidth speeds. So yes, the government has a role to play, because the government screwed it up to begin with, so now they need to unscrew it.