Telco Terrorism By Declan McCullagh (declan@well.com)

Right now, the telcos have no financial incentive to promote speedier, more efficient technologies - and when they've tried, they've blown it through a combination of high prices and notoriously bad customer service and support. Take ISDN, a digital technology that has been ready-to-arrive for 25 years but never quite did. "The problem isn't technology," according to James Love, an economist at the Ralph Nader-sponsored Consumer Project on Technology. "It's monopoly pricing by the telcos."

If the telcos don't want to use efficient, effective technology to render service to their customers, then I certainly wouldn't want to *force* them to do so. However, neither do I want to be *forced* to pay exhorbitant rates because the telecos want to maintain a sloppily run monopoly on the services I have to choose from.

The telcos' solution: the FCC must let them levy per-minute access charges to raise the hundreds of millions of dollars a year needed to keep the phone system from crashing.

My solution? (Thanks for asking. :>) If the telecos wish to remain in the Dark Ages, then let *their* phone system crash. There will be no shortage of people standing in line to make money by supplying customers with phone service at competitive rates.

"The Effect of Internet Use on the Nation's Telephone Network," blasted telco assumptions and pointed out their hypocrisy: the Baby Bells whine that flat-rate Internet services are congesting phone lines even as many of them are peddling flat-rate Internet access themselves. Some have actually given it away -

The old "loss-leader" promotion to get everyone into your store. The telecos, however, then want to lock the doors and petition the government for monopoly pricing, instead of letting the "customers" shop across the street, instead.

"It doesn't have to be a large charge," Bell Atlantic's Ed Young now says. "It can be something of the magnitude of a penny a minute, or even less. But it has to be something."

"...so that we can raise the rates outrageously in the future."

As a rule, Washington's bureaucrats are not power-crazed authoritarians; most are reactive creatures who simply respond to demonstrations of influence and power.

Translation~:~ They are usually manipulated by the most powerful and influential of the power-crazed authoritarians.

The high tech community responded by forming its own ad hoc coalition to pressure the FCC, and thousands of Internet users chimed in to express their collective dismay. Of course, the best way to win not just the battle but the war may be to remove the commission's power to regulate the Net altogether. Still, so far the real threat to netizens has come from complacent telcos and their legions of starched-collar lobbyists, not the FCC. The distinction is important, because the old rule of thumb still holds true: The enemy of our enemy may occasionally prove to be our friend.

As long as everyone has Guns & Roses (with sharp thorns). Say what you want about Timothy McVeigh, but if the government launches another Waco atrocity in the near future, the citizens will be paying much closer attention to the way it is handled. The attempt to control the InterNet is yet another attempt to disarm the citizens. They are trying to get us to "voluntarily" turn in our electronic weapons, such as crypto. "They will take my crypto when they pry it from my cold, dead algorithms." TruthMonger