Is it me...?
 

This makes me pretty mad:

Ive just been reading a tech magazine and it transpires that certain US cities wish to provide broadband to their residents at a reasonable price/speed as a large number of people are cheesed with the ISPs who provide crap service. Now, certain companies (namely Time Warner/AOL) have decided they dont like this because it is competition they cant A) buy and B) manipulate and so they have applied to the courts to prevent the cities from providing broadband services within their municipalities. They are also lobbying government to write legislation preventing cities from doing this in the future....which has a good chance of going through. So...these greed ridden corporations are prepared to spend more on legal action and lobbying government to effectively make competition illegal than on improving the service to their customers.
Is it just me here thinking that there is something very very wrong in this?

Re: Is it me...?
 

No, its not just you.

i think it is scandalous they are even able to file suit.

Capitalism gone mad

Re: Is it me...?
 

No. It's anyone with half a brain. It's disgraceful. The consumer has to put up with crap service because there's no other choice. The big corporations can charge what the hell they like.

Isn't this why the monopolies commision was put into place? Does the US not have an equivalent?

Re: Is it me...?
 

The legally enshrined laws of a free market economy ensure that the big corporations always win :mad:

Re: Is it me...?
 

Plus, of course there's the fact that the huge legal bill for this legal action will be paid for by ... the consumer. So, if this legislation goes through not only will inhabitants of those cities be prevented from getting reasonably priced internet service, but their internet bill form these companies will be HIGHER in order to pay the costs of the legal action... p*sses me off.

Re: Is it me...?
 

This reminds me of that film The Aviator - dunno if you've seen it but in it PAN AM air corp. try to push a bill through congress that forbids any other company from flying internationally, namely Howard Hughes' TWA corp from giving them a ton of ccompetition. In the film and reality the bill wasn't passed.
America is so proud of its 'free enterprise' society, I hope and pray it will stop this from happening.
Surely if it went through it would be massively 'unconstitutional?'
Mind you we do have a couple of Halliburton CEO's running the country so anythings possible.
Bring back the anti-globalisation riots on May 1st I say!

Re: Is it me...?
 

It's pretty silly...wonder how it'll do down in maine...they've just introduced free internet access to poor kids who get food coupons to get free access supposedly because it's unfair on them to not have access at home like other kids...they all have laptops, that was another scheme, sounded great, waste of money, those ibooks were shite, way to heavy for kids to lug around classes and they couldn't install anything other than what was on the puter, which was shite.

Re: Is it me...?
 

While I don't like it any more than you, I have to point out that the company managers are doing what they are required to do, act in the interest of their stockholders.
They are still going to get part of the action. The collected signal has to be "outloaded" or some similar thing, and the big operators will get to rig the bids on that.

Re: Is it me...?
 

Companies always have to adapt to market conditions, and so they should adapt to this. They need to find ways to make people want their service rather than another. I think I might still be tempted to pay for something other than a city run service as everyone knows that the quality and customer service on anything the city runs is likely to be just as bad as AOL is now.

Re: Is it me...?
 

Oh dont get me wrong you cant blame the businesses for doing it really. Altruism has never been a strong point in most business models. What really gets my goat is the fact they can even get court injunctions to prevent competition and then lobby goverment to introduce legislation to stop any competition by the application of big $$$ in the right places, and the fact they'd prefer to spen the $$$ on that than on making their service more inviting to the customers ....thats whats so wrong, its just bullying the consumer into using their products and services and in my mind is no better than communist state created monopolies. it completely flies in the face of the consitution. In a free trade country surely government and the courts should not be able to introduce laws to allow what are essentially monopolies purely because the CEO's etc of those companies sponsor political careers.

Re: Is it me...?
 

Wow! That's strange. I would've though poor kids would have benefited more from better housing, supplemental education (not via a computer), winter clothing, etc.



NC Penguin

Re: Is it me...?
 

I know, strange ole state...but its' okay, they have laptops and internet...who cares if know one can afford the oil to stay warm in the winter...

speaking of, the folks are lucky because FIL gets to keep the off cuts from the trees, and it's good quality wood that burns slowly with a lot of heat, would cost a fortune if they had to buy that as well...his only problem, he's got to get it from the mountains to home on his own, and the off cuts are *****ing heavy as I helped lug them last year :D