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Technology Stocks : AUTOHOME, Inc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E. Davies who wrote (9272)	5/8/1999 12:10:00 AM
From: ahhaha	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29970

If you followed this thread over the last several years you would find that lack of funding was always the big impediment. That's why the T purchase of TCI was so significant. It implied big money was coming to help build-out ATHM. It's still a problem for T and that fact drove Comcast to consider going it alone. If you have to build it, you might as well get the lion's share of the revenues. RBOCs are not MSFT. RBOCs have their own problems. If they strung fiber, then that would imply that they would have to concede common carrier status to the long haul operator. They couldn't charge reciprocal compensation, because BB telephony status isn't subsumed strictly under copper circuit switched telephony. BB telephony is exempt of FCC copper ruling maybe only because of its nascence. It is this twist by which the FCC hopes to trump the RBOCs adamancy against an ex tempore opening of their telephony local market. The exact status of short and long haul BB telephony is not determined and when BB Internet is mixed in, you have necessarily the need for the intent of the '96 Act to be liberally applied. That means free-for-all. It will go that way anyway regardless of what the FCC or any authority wants. They can only get in the way and slow the process down, but 33.6 has made any slowing very dangerous to politicians, and so the pols better take the FCC's latest open mindedness under advisement. It is true that AOL could join an RBOC just as easily as joining T. I have often suggested they will inevitably do that. I describe it as T-TCI-ATHM vs SBC-CMSCA-AOL, etc. My suggestion would expedite this inevitability, because it would mean that T had a market opening intent. If AOL wouldn't cooperate in an agreement to exchange say infrastructure investment for access, they would be conceding the BB Internet market to T-ATHM. I don't believe they'd do that. Too many guys like you and I telling them otherwise. At the very least they would form a consortium with say an RBOC and attempt to buy COX.