by starroute » Mon Oct 03, 2005 1:11 pm
There's not much in Venezuela worth exploiting except the oil, so that gives Chavez some room to work in. But the American "consumer" is to giant corporations as aphids are to ants. They expect the right to come around and milk us regularly, and throw hissy-fits if they're denied.<br><br>See, for example, this article on Google's proposal to provide free wireless access to San Francisco:<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.linuxpipeline.com/blog/archives/2005/10/google_in_the_a.html">www.linuxpipeline.com/blo...the_a.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Besides having the resources to build and run the network at no cost to anyone else, there's another reason why I think Google is the best choice: It has the resources and the will to fight back against companies that would love to kill the very idea of municipal Wi-Fi.<br><br>Although national ISPs such as Earthlink and even Yahoo come to mind, I don't think they'll go beyond grumbling about the plan. But the prospect of genuine competition simply petrifies the telecom industry -- in this case, our widely-despised local provider, SBC Communications. I don't see them allowing this to happen without a legal and/or legislative fight, although they might think twice if they faced an opponent that could buy them -- perhaps literally. . . .<br><br>We've also heard from Vince Vasquez, a "policy fellow" with the Pacific Research Institute, who says he opposes any municipal involvement in providing wireless Internet access. "Our concern is with public money and publicly controlled Internet access," Vasquez told the San Francisco Chronicle. "We take a lot of caution about how government should intervene in the market."<br><br>Surprise: The Pacific Research Institute receives funding from SBC. This may explain why Vasquez can utter free-market platitudes without addressing an equally vital concern for any conservative think tank: Telling the federal government to butt out of local jurisdictions' affairs.<br><br>That's relevant here, because SBC is all about Congress sticking its noses where they don't belong. If you'll recall, one of the company's former employees, Representative Pete Sessions (R-TX), introduced a bill that would outlaw municipal-sponsored networks. If that bill fails (which seems likely), you can expect these weasels to try again and again to strip local communities of the right to decide what types of public services they support.<br><br>When you think about it, bare-bones, 300kbps wireless Internet access isn't even a very daunting competitive barrier; any competent private service provider would have more than enough, above and beyond such a service, to offer its customers. But just as some companies would rather use sham intellectual-property claims to extort money from customers and competitors, a company like SBC would rather spend its money buying congressmen and tainted "policy research" than deal with customers who have a choice.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br>The Pacific Research Institute, by the way, is one of those Scaife-funded, hard-right think-tanks. Anti-environmental, anti-affirmative action, free market extremists. The usual.<br> <p></p><i></i>
