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Separate infrastructure and service. Require companies to sell access to the infrastructure a wholesale price to anybody who wants in. This way it allows for ne
by spiralpolitik 12y ago
Separate infrastructure and service. Require companies to sell access to the infrastructure a wholesale price to anybody who wants in. This way it allows for new entrants to the market who can find different ways of packaging the wholesale price at lower cost to the consumer without requiring them to build infrastructure.
(The service part of the infrastructure company pays the same wholesale price as everybody else so that there are no advantages to owning both)
This is the model that a lot of European countries with post privatization telecoms monopolies went with and has worked surprisingly well and has kept prices low.
- zanny 12y agoOr if you are building infrastructure on taxpayer dollar keep it public like they keep almost everything else. Depends on location, but usually power lines are public but maintained by a private contracted company, roads are public but are maintained either by subcontracted engineering corps or state public unionized engineers, sewer lines are public, etc. It seem we only think that twisted pair / coaxial / fiber channels should cross everyones private property but stay privately owned. On average at least. I know a lot of backwards thinking that leads to the privatization of other infrastructure (water, power, etc) that leads to tremendous exploitation of the citizenry by the monopoly provider.
- breischl 12y agoThis is exactly what the Baby Bells are required to do with their lines. This is why you sometimes see small regional DSL providers - they're leasing the lines from the Baby Bell and reselling them. That might also be why the two companies doing really shady net neutrality stuff are both cable providers rather than DSL providers - the DSL providers wouldn't be able to get away with it.