32 Years of the Digest ... founded August 21, 1981
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The Telecom Digest for October 21, 2013
Volume 32 : Issue 219 : "text" Format
====== 32 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ======
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Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 20:55:31 -0700 (PDT)
From: HAncock4 <withheld@invalid.telecom-digest.org>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Canada to propose forcing a la carte programming
Message-ID: <d879684a-5cf7-4f8f-abc4-c8758cd9cd42@googlegroups.com>
On Saturday, October 19, 2013 12:03:40 PM UTC-4, Bill Horne wrote:
> The government's job is not to protect us from our own folly. The
> government's job is to protect us from our neighbor's folly. We
> have, and need to exercise, the option of turning the set off and
> going to talk to our neighbors: about politics, the deficit, how
> schools are failing at every level, our kids, the "ancient political
> fish-like smell", or whatever the topic of the day is.
Government regulating business affairs is nothing new.
About 100 years ago some corporations became so large that the
traditional model of marketplace competition no longer applied. These
companies had concentrated enough economic power to themselves to
treat their employees, customers, and suppliers as they dictated.
This was determined to be harmful to the country and anti-trust laws
were born.
Recall that about 60 years ago the US government felt that the Bell
System was an improper monopoly, despite it being tigtly regulated. A
consent decree was obtained restricting the Bell System to mostly
communications and defense and requiring it to license out its
patents.
Government involvment in the entertainment industry isn't new either.
In the entertainment industry, a few years earlier, the motion picture
studios were forced to divest the studios they owned so that
independent studios could get a fair shot at renting movies. This
marked the separation of film production and exhibition.
Because broadcast television had an oligopoly using very limited TV
airwaves, the government imposed strict regulation on broadcasters
(both networks and individual stations) in exchange for being allowed
to utilize those airwaves.
In recent years, however, things have changed dramatically. We're
back to extensively vertically integrated entertainment empires. We
have Comcast, which provides telephone service, ISP, cable TV, as well
as owning Universal pictures and NBC. We have telephone companies
providing telephone, ISP, and cable TV service (e.g. Verizon FIOS).
We have seen cable rates go up significantly year after year. Given
that, as well as the history of business, it is certainly reasonable
to take a fresh look at restoring government regulation that once
existed in the past. FWIW, Comcast is very profitable.
(In other words, years ago many people complained that the old Bell
System was fleecing the public by buying its suplies from its own
Western Electric--passing on inflated high prices to the customer.
Today we have Comcast reselling its own content just like Western
Electric.)
TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly to telecom-
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