OMG!!! One set of people has something less than another set of people!!! Something must be done!!
There are people out there who do not have highspeed (in particular cable) internet service!
Many live in rural areas of even ghettos!
What is the answer, what is the answer?
Well as a first reaction from those at the NYTimes, apparently it’s “force these companies to share their cables to that more “competition” is created and prices will come down.
The answer to this puzzle is regulatory policy. Over the last 10 years, we have deregulated high-speed Internet access in the hope that competition among providers would protect consumers. The result? We now have neither a functioning competitive market for high-speed wired Internet access nor government oversight.
By contrast, governments that have intervened in high-speed Internet markets have seen higher numbers of people adopting the technology, doing so earlier and at lower subscription charges. Many of these countries have required telecommunications providers to sell access to parts of their networks to competitors at regulated rates, so that competition can lower prices.
Was this directly copied from Atlas Shrugged? Maybe in a speech given by Dagny’s brother?
Today, the problem is about affording unregulated high-speed Internet service — provided, in the case of cable, by a few for-profit companies with very little local competition and almost no check on their prices. They have to bear all the cost of infrastructure and so have no incentive to expand into rural areas, where potential customers are relatively few and far between. (The Federal Communications Commission recently announced a plan to convert subsidies that once supported basic rural telephone services into subsidies for basic Internet access.)
The bigger problem is the lack of competition in cable markets. Though there are several large cable companies nationwide, each dominates its own fragmented kingdom of local markets: Comcast is the only game in Philadelphia, while Time Warner dominates Cleveland. That is partly because it is so expensive to lay down the physical cables, and companies, having paid for those networks, guard them jealously, clustering their operations and spending tens of millions of dollars to lobby against laws that might oblige them to share their infrastructure.
It’s not fair, it’s not fair. These companies came up with the plan, placed the infrastructure and now they won’t share!
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