Below, when Fred refers to DirecWay shutting down, I believe that he means SpaceWay and DirecTV's decision to charge $1.6B against
earnings and use the satellites for DBS TV instead.
Imo, neither service should be considered competitive anyway due to the cost, latency, and bandwidth throttling "FAP" (Fair Access
Policy).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
For us who are not grounded in the history of each
subsection and consequences thereof, would you
please give us the short version - one that we can
1. Section 271
2. computer II and common carriage.
1. Section 271 is the part of the Telecom Act that overturned the MFJ
restriction on Bell company entry into long distance. It established a
14-point checklist that each Bell company had to meet in each state, before
being granted "Section 271 authority" to sell interLATA service. Each
state PUC and then the FCC had to approve each such state
application. Section 271 authority can theoretically be revoked if the
Bell stops obeying. Note that in Texas, SBC is a Bell but Verizon isn't.
The checklist includes unbundling a number of items, including switching,
loops, and transport. So when the TRO revoked the Section 251 "impairment"
requirement for some of those to be unbundled, CLECs in Bell areas invoked
Section 271. That does not necessarily, some argue, require cost-based
(TELRIC) pricing, just making them available. The SBC petition, IIRC, goes
a bit farther, saying that the RBOCs don't even have to make them
available. By the SBC Petition's logic, if there's no Section 251
impairment shown, then Section 271's requirements are void.
2. Computer II was, perhaps, the single most important FCC decision of the
past 25 years. It, along with the earlier Sharing and Resale ruling,
literally made the Internet possible. Computer II addressed several
things, including terminal equipment. Essentially, what it did was require
the telephone companies (it was during the late Bell System era, just
before divestiture) to structurally separate themselves into regulated and
unregulated entities. The regulated entity (which became the RBOC a year
later) could provide basic telecommunications services, such as dial tone
and leased lines, but could not provide "enhanced" services or terminal
equipment. The idea was to prevent the telephone company from leveraging
its monopoly on services into unregulated areas. They had been renting a
lot of PBXs under tariff, a practice that Computer II banned. Hence when
it took effect (1/1/83), AT&T opened the doors of "American Bell Inc."
(later ATTIS), its "fully separated subsidiary", and introduced its first
digital PBX, which had literally been sitting on the shelf for three years
awaiting detariffing.
This is relevant to the Internet because it banned Bells from providing
enhanced services except through an arms'-length subsidiary, which had to
purchase the underlying services on the same terms as anyone else. A few
years later, Computer III loosened it up a bit, removing the structural
separation (so the same sales force, for instance, could sell and install
both PBXs and lines), but still requiring the underlying services to be
offered.
BellSouth argues that Computer II is bad because it raises their cost of
DSL-fed ISP service by about two bucks a month. Due to Computer II,
there's a DSL telecom service and there's a separate, unregulated, ISP
service. Independent ISPs can buy just the former, while they prefer to
retail the latter, which buys the former and theoretically marks it up. (In
practice, they've been accused of marking it down, which could be seen as
predatory, but that's another issue.) If BellSouth gets their way, they
can dump the neutral ATM layer and just stick IP in the DSLAMs, with
BellSouth.net addresses, and either you subscribe to that or you don't use
THEIR wire. They argue that this is fine because the consumer can try to
get a satellite dish (though DirecWay just shut down) or WiFi (yeah, right)
or cable (maybe, but not open to ISPs) or just use the "wireless web" that
Cingular gives you on your cell phone. ISPs are, well, useless
intermediary trash.
3. Common carriage is the ancient principle (19th century if not earlier)
that a "carrier" is not responsible for the content, and can't "peek inside
the envelope". So when you make a phone call, the LEC can't listen in and
charge based on the "value" of what you say -- say, demand a share of the
price of that pizza you order. An ISP, as a non-common-carrier, is
technically expected to think about content, and block sites freely, or
cache them, or whatever, but a common carrier can't. A common carrier
pipe's just a pipe. Computer II is, in effect, a reinforcement of this; it
put in structural boundaries between what a common carrier did and what a
non-common carrier did with the common carriage.
Independent ISPs depend on common carriage, of course -- the IP layer is
*above* common carriage, so the Bell-captive ISP is just another
customer. By doing away with this, at least on "broadband" (which can be
defined *quite* broadly), independent ISPs will lose their access to the
raw bandwidth that they run on.
Without question, the ILEC bunch regrets they screwed
up when the Internet started - and now they want it, lock,
stock and barrel.
How true.
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