TexasCHLforum.com

Unless I'm mistaken, the Farm to Market road system in Texas, like a similar one in Pennsylvania, was an example of government regulation over the free market environment. Traffic over the FM roads could not justify their existence but the government did it anyway under the banner of giving everyone equal access and promoting commerce.

Using the inch=mile, once you do it in one area, it is pretty easy to do it in another.

The really interesting juxtaposition is that the Federal government originally owned the Internet and tried to give it to AT&T so that they would maintain it. In governmental hands, laying fiber everywhere would have been pretty easy because they could use eminent domain to lay the cables. Before it was brought down by corruption, MCI became a rousing success by buying up old pipeline rights of way and using them to lay fiber optic cables, bypassing a huge bottleneck for acquiring access to the ground needed to accomplish the building of a network. Now, we've come full circle and because the Internet has become so successful, the governments wants it back - to regulate and tax. I firmly believe that the saliva is flowly freely, dripping from the corners of politicians' mouths at prospects of regulation because that would open the door for taxation.

rm9792 wrote: As an employee of one of those evil telephone companies I can attest that deregulation in 1986 caused service and quality to got heck in a handbasket real quick. Customers say that more than the employees. It is simply not a business that lends itself to competition, much like cable tv.

i agree that the service deteriorated back in the 80s - but this is now almost 30 years later. Cell phones and fiber optic distribution has changed everything. The government regulations on the phone companies have done nothing but box in the phone companies and not let them compete. I'm no fan of Verizon (who would work hard to pour water out of a boot with the instructions printed on the heal) or ATT but the government intervention into those businesses has not helped the consumer. Comcast and Time Warner Cable are regulated in different ways by local governments and that regulation hasn't served the public well either.

I consider Verizon to be the location of the perfect storm in telecom. Considering Verizon's inept management, the union's inept involvement (my brother worked there for 30+ years) and the government inept regulations, the result has been a disaster. While it wouldn't fix the problem, limiting or eliminating the government's intervention would make a significant improvement. And the latter is the same group that wants to regulate the Internet. NO THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

The Annoyed Man wrote:Wall Street Journal
The Net Neutrality Coup, by John Fund, WSJ
The campaign to regulate the Internet was funded by a who's who of left-liberal foundations.

The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr. McChesney's agenda? "At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies," he told the website SocialistProject in 2009. "But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control."

A year earlier, Mr. McChesney wrote in the Marxist journal Monthly Review that "any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself." Mr. McChesney told me in an interview that some of his comments have been "taken out of context." He acknowledged that he is a socialist and said he was "hesitant to say I'm not a Marxist."

This is the man that Obama takes his inspiration from. We are in deep deep trouble if Congress doesn't act in January to strip FCC of this specific authority.