For another, the Bells for the past century have been a monopoly and nurtured by government. Nothing makes clearer the control exercised by the Bells than a remarkable admission by SBC s chairman Ed Whitacre. On March 14, he wrote Tauzin that a million consumers in Illinois cannot now, and may never, have access to DSL service if his company isn t relieved of state regulations requiring it to unbundled its services and offer them to competitors at a wholesale rate. Whitacre thinks so. And that, as Harvill said, is truly chilling.
History shows it won t be the expansion of affordable broadband.
Just such policies in Europe and Japan have curbed the Internet s growth there, to those nations economic detriment. In the U.S., brave CLECs stepped up to the plate and gave those ISPs good low-cost service. Only when the upstart CLECs began delivering it to customers at affordable prices did the Bells start to do the same. A competitive market would not allow SBC to hike prices for its DSL service 25 percent, as it did last month. Certainly, the answer is not to follow the choice that Tauzin recommends.