intercommunication blog

Regulation Never Worked

Regulation of the Bell System never worked. The degree to which the Bell System obtained a workable balance between profits and serving the public interest depended on self-regulation. The legacy of Theodore Vail accounts for the remarkable durability of telecom monopoly as he invent the notion of balancing the two. The company finally strayed sufficiently from Vail's vision to produce the breakup in 1984. The leadership of the companies still in possesion of monopoly control over the local telephone networks stayed even father away from Vail vision. Verizon's misdeeds far exceed those of the pre-breakup AT&T thanks to Ivan Seidenberg. These misdeeds will produce a backlash the eliminates monopoly in telecom once a for all. Vail understood abuse of power does not last very long.

The Example and Experience of Solon

The Supreme Court Building includes representations of those who created laws over the years. This includes Moses, Confuicious, and Solon.

I found a nice write up on Solon at


http://www.e-classics.com/solon.htm

Solon was born into a well-to-do family of Athens. He worked as a merchant in the export-import trade, and he considered himself relatively poor. He did not worship money, as is evident from these poems of his:

The man whose riches satisfy his greed
Is not more rich for all those heaps and hoards
Than some poor man who has enough to feed
And clothe his corpse with such as God affords.

I have no use for men who steal and cheat;
The fruit of evil poisons those who eat.

Some wicked men are rich, some good men poor,
But I would rather trust in what's secure;
Our virtue sticks with us and makes us strong,
But money changes owners all day long.

# posted by Daniel @ 8:10 AM

Euphemism Alert - "Rationalize"

Ivan The Terrible noted regarding questions about acquisition plans during an Atlantic Monthly sponsored event a disinterest for the time being in aquisitions. He added an expectation that the telecom industry will "rationalize" over the next couple years. He clarified this meant deregulation and consolidation. Keep in mind ITT uses the term Rationalize because he knows people will get uncomfortable with the truth - Monopolize.

SPAM Self Limits

The various and growing upset about SPAM seems a bit over blown. The problem seems self limiting by nature as it cannot not serve the legitimate business sector. Unsolicited communication comes in many forms - fax, regular mail, telephone calls - and via the Internet email, but the nature of SPAM makes it a poor tool for the legitimate economy. There seems a remarkably narrow set off offerings that arrive via SPAM.

Predicting the Future Always Problematic

pulver.com has a Wireless Internet Summit coming up in a few weeks toward getting great minds together in an exercise to predict the wireless future. It reminds me of something Joe Rinde said at one point - "You can predict what will happen or when something will happen, but you can't predict both at the same time." In 1984 or so, I attended a speech by Edward Feigenbaum the person credited with founding the Expert System approach to Artificial Intelligence. He offered with strong conviction that expert systems would make software programmers obsolete. The prediction tended to move me away from software programming. He was wrong.

Competitive Threats?

All of the articles covering Verizon's woes (and other Bells) claim the existence of some severe competition threatening Verizon. There seems a considerable lack of perspective in this assertions. Verizon suffers very very small competitive threats to its core landline business in terms of scale. The CLEC's at their peak in 1999 represented a matchbox toy car relative to the real thing ala a 60:1 scale. Verizon is in trouble as the they can't don't have enough fingers to plug leaks in the dam, but claiming severe competition seems silly. They have "some" competition which destroys their business model depending on total domination. They don't have competition in a true sense of say McDonalds versus Burger King or AT&T versus MCI.

Internet Does Not Displace Books

Many compare the impact of the Internet relatively to the profound impact of the printing press in making books affordable. The Internet does seem likely to dominate as a source of information going forward, but it does not seem likely to displace books as the dominant form of historical record. Information present on the Internet has an immediacy albeit transient nature. The Internet serves the world's real-time communication needs, but books likely will remain the dominant form that supports information transfer between generations.

Triple Play or Three Strikes Your Out

The much discuss triple play seems likely to prove an illusion for both the Bells and the Cable Co's. Decoupling connectivity and the application means the Bells and Cable Co's lose control over who provides voice and video. They might try to exclude other players, but there exist enough holes in the access dike to make that a losing proposition.