"Matt Barrow" wrote in message
...

What would you rather have it controlled by... the Government?

As when the FCC pretty much caused the 2000 Telecom crash?

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/h...mm-telecom.htm

As a victim of the 2000 telecom crash, I disagree:

"The telecom collapse is now often chalked up to several years of irrational
exuberance on Wall Street, together with accounting fraud by WorldCom, one
of the industry's leaders. But-as Michael Powell, for one, appears to
recognize-there is a serious case to be made that the industry's refractory
problems can be traced to a single source: the FCC's own implementation of
the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Thereby hangs a most dismal tale."

Coincidence, but wrong. "Irrational exuberance" is the most accurate part of
this statement. I worked for the fifth largest network provider on the west
coast. They laid a multimillion dollar fiberoptic backbone between several
states, decided they didn't need it, leased it to Sprint, decided they
needed it and then had to lease it back from Sprint, thus basically blowing
millions of dollars. They spent tens of thousands of dollars to locate an
ideal office facility in Seattle and then realized they not only already had
one there, they'd been paying the lease and utilities on an empty building
for some time. It had just fallen off the Facilities record. THEN, the
same thing happened in San Francisco.

At the same time, salespeople were selling business based on the promise of
a future product, while all the engineers were trying to tell marketing that
the product that they were promising and were selling to investors was -not
technically possible-.

Meanwhile, they hired people at ridiculous salaries, gave them the
equivalent of a college education, and those employees went to places like
Time Warner, GST, because those companies would cheerfully pay for the
skills that our company had given them. But then when that company went
bankrupt, our company hired all those people back. But, somehow, they ended
up getting substantially more money than they did before they betrayed the
company in the first place, which meant they were making twice as much as
the people who remained loyal.

Basically people were just throwing money around and job-jumping, screwing
each other over, making promises and setting ridiculous stock
expectations...and people were buying into it, for awhile. A lot of people
in the industry saw it coming, but if you said anything about it--like the
engineers who said the product they were selling to investors was like
promising that next year's Toyota would fly--you were likely to be one of
the first to go when the layoffs happened.

But if it wasn't for that competition, you would not have the internet
diversity and bandwidth that you have now.

-c