Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 7th Sep 2007 13:37 UTC, submitted by Adurbe
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
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Member since:
2006-11-22
Competition - so you have 1 phone company monopoly, 1 cable monopoly and 1 wireless (near monopoly). Of course if any of those are unusable (bad signal, too far from DSLAM,etc.) the pool thins out even more.
The system has been tuned to soak maximum money from the customers.
If the copper/fiber infrastructure was seen as a monopoly and regulated as such (including prohibited from higher level services) the customer would see maximum competition for the largest part of the services stack. If on the other-hand a monopoly is allowed to extend to the ISP or even content provider level then the customer would see the least competition.
According to this:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/24/bloomberg/bxatt.php
consolidation seems to be profitable. Please keep in mind that is after all the high buck exec salaries and bonuses.
Competition does usually lower profit margin but it also usually increases value to the customer. In competitive markets companies tend to operate more efficiently as well.