Wouldn't the solution then be to eliminate the capacity of local municipalities to grant cable monopolies? Fiber is compact -- five or even twenty cable companies could coexist happily in New York (where I live) if the city didn't grant "franchises", which it charges exhorbitantly for. With large scale competition between cable companies, monopolies would no longer be a problem.
That's certainly part of it, though not part of the immediate EFF Open Platform initiative, which is more national in scope. This "franchise" problem is a local matter, and would best be handled by local organizations. If you are really concerned with this, try contacting the Society for Electronic Access (SEA), since you live in NYC. They may already be working on this, though I cannot of course vouch for them. Mailing simona@sea.org or simona@panix.com should put you in touch with them.
In order to get to a world in which free markets can meet our demand for high-bandwidth connectivity, we have to dig ourselves out from the market-failure position we're in now.
Isn't the problem in question the result of government granted, rather than natural, monopolies? Isn't it thus wrong to call it a "market failure"? Seems more like yet another government failure.
Why would a "natural monopoly" be any better? This is a rather moot point. The problem here is that such monopolistic entities, whatever their provenance, don't give a rat's ass for whether or not you want a lot of bandwidth for multimedia email, or whatever. Left to their own devices, they'll happly feed you 5000 channels of tv, plus perhaps some oh-so-interactive teleshopping clubs and the like. Part of the effort that must be made is to knock some sense into the rapidly merging entertainment/information/telecom conglomerates, and try to at very least keep a large section of the "data highway" (or whatever one chooses to call it) an Internet-like many-to-many communications medium, if not fused with Internet itself. Convincing the govt. of this is will also take some doing. One certainly can't IGNORE the govt. No matter how much we may wish it'd just go away, it won't, and has to be dealt with. -- Stanton McCandlish mech@eff.org 1:109/1103 EFF Online Activist & SysOp O P E N P L A T F O R M C R Y P T O P O L I C Y O N L I N E R I G H T S N E T W O R K I N G V I R T U A L C U L T U R E I N F O : M E M B E R S H I P @ E F F . O R G