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Very well said.I appreciate the up front answer Rev. But in my mind, this is just unrealistic. It's no different than Ron Paul droning on about being completely isolationist or like those who declare we should just remove marriage from governent all together as their ONLY option as it relates to that issue. It's a great stance to have in a smokey room with a bunch of collegues waxing philisophical regarding policy, but has little real impact on the real world.
In an ideal world I agree, that's my prefered method for that as well. I said in another thread, in a perfect sort of world I'd say the backbone infastructure which is even more monopolized then the telecoms would continue to be regulated and subsidized by the government, while the actual middle men (the ISPs) would be far less regulated and far more open and free with a lower bar to hurdle to gain entry into the market place.
But it's just extremely unlikely given the importance to the telecoms those things you speak of are and how much influence they have over politicians on both sides of the aisles...there's little to no chance that we see the government legitimately bust up their monopolies. So simply saying that's the answer, and looking at no other alternative, is no different in my eyes than saying "just leave things the way they are"....because ultimatley, realistically, that's what will happen. There's little to no chance those psued-monopolies are busted, and if that doesn't happen and that's all we say we want to try, then the reality is that we just go with the status quo.
Even if you look at now, Cruz hasn't said one word about busting up the telecoms. Not a single one that I've seen. All he's done is **** on the Democratic proposals and tacitly suggest we just need to maintain the status quo.
And the status quo is not working. The status quo has been a steady movement away from net neutrality proposals, with clear reasons to see that the telecoms have every intent to continue that push.
What's really bothersome about this entire issue is how simple it is to arrive at the right solution, but how difficult it would be to actually do it. The right answer is to put ISP's in a new class, lightly regulated to ensure even competition while also allowing flexibility and innovation. In short, keep all the regulations roughly the way they are now, but add a requirement to ensure that all packets of a type are treated equally (ie a packet of video from Hulu isn't treated differently than a packet from netflix). Given a few weeks we could probably craft a rough draft on this forum. It's simple, non partisan, and essentially everyone with any background in IT is in agreement.
Unfortunately it requires politicians to actually do something besides political grandstanding. It's really a sad indictment of our current political system when the fear of your opponent getting credit for accomplishing something outweighs the need to accomplish anything.