The FACT then is that the FCC by its own choices does not have the authority its the usual Bush era BS that can be fixed quickly by moving them back into telecoms.

Its MAD

But for how long? I'd like to see it regulated in stone that they can't.

I'm normally as Capitalist as anyone here but in all fairness when has an opportunity to make more money not been pursued by big business? Has that ever happened, ever?

I don't much give a crap as long as my bill doesn't go up (in fact I'd rather see it go down), but if my internet bill becomes as convoluted as my electric and telephone bills with their tax for this and charge for that and delivery charge (which somehow is different from transmission charge) and the rest of it i'm gonna be pissed.

There IS a remedy to the Comcast decision no one has addressed yet. Virtually ALL of Comcast's cable service areas are local Municipal Monopoly Operations. That means that Comcast signed deals with local towns and cities for monopoly service in exchange for building the coax cable infrastructure in the US. What if people in their local communities were to lobby their municipal elected officials to end the Monopoly agreements and open the contracts up to competitive bidding to ALL Telecoms, ISPs, cable and wireless companies? How would THAT impact Comcast's bottom-line? The National fiberoptic backbone is ultra-fast at OC-192 DWDM levels, or over 4 million voice channels per fiber. That backbone is slowed considerably by the fact that most of the last mile subscriber loops in the country are either 40-50 year-old coaxial cable or 60-70 year-old twisted copper wire pairs. The analogy I use is if you took a Ferrari Testarossa and put a 45 mph governor on the fuel intake system. Until fiber is actually deployed to the subscriber loop, this problem will not go away.

Comcast gets to be king of the hill with coax but google and city broadband utilities are starting to go for fiber all the way. Any town that gets google ISP is going to see comcasts local profits crumble. One of the reasons why they are politically shooting themselves in the foot by getting this ruling. If they try somthing funky they may face a double whammy of being switched to telecom and harsh competition from fiber.

Whatever the case tho. DSL is so screwed :P

DSL is pretty much dead around here. Verizon takes down the copper lines to any house where it installs FiOS so there is no turning back. Not even to a regular pots line.

Verizon is not exactly a good company but the phone line system is on its last legs. DSL has been the only thing keeping them from being torn down for their copper.

The only arguement for a hard line system is resiliency in a time of crisis but even that is no longer true because all the switchboxes are now computers anyway. Besides you would always use long arrays of cat5 cable in emergencies requiring direct connection analog.

DSL is simply unable to keep up. You can't even effectively watch youtube at 360p on it anymore. But of course it will take a decade before its fully phased out because that is the only option for so many people.

I just knew the left couldn't keep Bush out of this for long... :up:

I don't have a problem with that ... so long as its passed by elected officials, and the law would be crystal clear.

Except that the deregulation DID happen under Bush and that is why this is happening.

Well it aint over. There is backroom manuvering going on right now on capitol hill.

I tried to find some news feeds on it but have come up empty so far but it basically boils down to the federal goverment 'purchasing' bandwidth.

I will keep my eyes open for a news story on it.