Technology

The author misses a few key points about the American model:

First, in exchange for the local territorial monopoly, the providers are supposed to be heavily regulated by the local (or State) government, with controls in place to prevent abuse of the monopoly and promote the interests of its residents. Of course, we all know how business interests influence government to make business- friendly regulations. Governments have the ability to enforce more user-friendly practices, if they choose to do so.

But the more important point is that in the US, we hand out different monopolies based on the connection type. For instance, where I live we have one company that owns the twisted-pair POTS landlines, a different company that owns the coaxial cable TV service, and another company that owns the direct fiber to the home. Three companies, three connections to each home, all three (theoretically) capable of delivering the same services, since there is no longer any real differentiation between voice, video, and data service: it's all just bits.

We just got our FTTH provider only recently. Before that, our choices were only the cable company or the telco's astonishingly show DSL. So I subscribed to the Cable company, and their pricing model tried to force you into a bundle for the other services. Their speeds were also quite slow for broadband, until the Fiber company started digging. Then I got all sorts of emails saying "we're increasing your speed -- for free!" And sure enough, I was getting better bandwidth. But all that did was piss me off. These losers could have given me that better service all along, but didn't bother until they were forced to.

So I'm on the fiber now. But I know how it works, this service will be awesome at first, but once this company finishes building out they won't sign on any new capacity and it will gradually get shittier over time. It's the American Way!

(And I still pay the local telco way too much money for a POTS landline. What can I say, I'm an old.)