Hanging up on the Competition

HANGING UP ON COMPETITION
[SOURCE: C-Net|News.com, AUTHOR: Mayor Martin Chavez, Albuquerque]
[Comentary] Like many elected officials, the nation's mayors have taken a renewed interest in telecommunications as the so-called video reform legislation, sponsored by Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, and urged by the nation's telephone companies, is considered in the U.S. Congress. And no wonder. The legislation will likely determine the extent to which our constituents will ever benefit from broadband competition. The nation's mayors generally tend to agree on three central principles that should govern any reform legislation: It should promote competition; it should make sure that consumers, not special interests, benefit; and it should ensure that the market and not the government will pick and choose winners. Rather than removing real barriers to entry, the telephone companies really want legislation to end the role of local government in protecting consumers, and to repeal the existing antidiscrimination rules that require all cable operators--big and small--to provide the latest digital broadband services to every neighborhood in their footprint. Legislators should take pause. The telephone companies are the biggest telecom companies in the world and have been built with massive government subsidies and ratepayer-guaranteed rates of return. Every time they get so-called regulatory relief, prices rise, competition suffers and promises about deploying broadband networks are broken. Now they want Congress to give them a permission slip to exclude many, if not most, of those ratepayers from upgrades to their publicly subsidized networks. If there were serious barriers to entry into the cable industry, I would be the first to champion reform. But the alleged obstacles are really trumped up stalking horses intended to help sneak through a repeal of a law that would otherwise ensure that all neighborhoods benefit from broadband competition. Elected officials know that public policy decisions involve trade-offs. In making those decisions, we need to ask ourselves whether the decisions will benefit consumers or large corporate interests. Video franchise legislation seeks to solve competition problems that don't really exist while repealing a system of law that's critical to equal opportunity and to our economic productivity. And that's a very unwise trade-off.
http://news.com.com/Hanging+up+on+the+competition/2010-1037_3-6071741.html?tag=html.alert