[ale] Comcast Caps Data at 250G/Month

[tom]

On Sun, 7 Sep 2008, Jim Popovitch wrote:

> On Sun, Sep 7, 2008 at 01:48, Brian Pitts <brian at polibyte.com> wrote:
>> To avoid getting sucked into this further, I'll just say that I'm in
>> favor of Public Knowledge's Principles for an Open Broadband Future [0],
>> particularly
>>
>> 1. Open Competition Among Broadband Providers
>
> I too like what this initiative.  BUT... how do we (as consumers,
> taxpayers, as well as possible stock investors) get from *here* to
> *there*?  There is a big gap between reality and nirvana.
>

The only way I can see is a two step. First advocate, educate, 
publicise(sp?) the value of a change. Eventually, using the power of the 
soveriegn voter, require.

Obviously there are a number of substeps being ignored here...

Ultimately, the theory of our government has we the voters as the ultimate 
authority of our society, not the wealthy/large power structure. They do 
not own us. As such, we need to reorder several markets to encourage them 
to do public good in their own search for private gain. Electric power 
distribution and electronic communications (phone, internet, push/cable 
video come to mind) are two market sets which suffer from the 
economics/physics of the "last mile" problem which gives incumbent 
providers a tremendous competative advantage.

As this is a Linux list and not a politics/philosophy list, and because 
I've got other chores I need to do, I will refraim from expounding my 
infinite wisdom ( 8-) ) and leave the details to the reader to work out.