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But how do you force a publicly traded company to become a utility when it's in their best interests not to?
by josh2600 14y ago
But how do you force a publicly traded company to become a utility when it's in their best interests not to?
- xyzzy123 14y agoThe stick is regulation, and the carrot is money. Unfortunately, it's really hard to do once the govt. money is spent. I'm familiar with AU/NZ. Both are pumping significant public money into broadband infrastructure, and they took different approaches to enforcing fair network access. In AU, they created a new company (NBN co) to run the "utility" part. See: http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/nbn http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/nbn The government is paying the monopoly incumbent to switch users onto the new network. In NZ, our privately owned largest telco (Telecom NZ) semi-voluntarily split itself into two parts - a retail and a wholesale branch. The shareholders agreed to do this, because that meant the wholesale part (Chorus) would get a big govt. contract to lay fiber to the door. In theory, the split is "arms length", so other network providers can access the infrastructure on fair terms. Reference: http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/5858284/Telecom-split-first-in-world http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/5858284/Telecom-s... It remains to be seen whether this is the right way to go about things, but both approaches do seem plausible.