On the heels of a series of special reports on why Indiana is losing high-tech jobs to other states (causing "brain drain" of its college-educated children), the Indianapolis Star runs this brain-dead editorial:
Our position is: Keeping the legislature out of phone company regulation is a choice of prudence over politics.The battle of the bare-knuckled ads appears to have ended in victory for consumers and entrepreneurs now that state Sen. James Merritt has decided against allowing a vote on the SBC bill.
I wouldn't call that a victory for consumers. A victory for entrepreneurs who aren't interested in building infrastructure, yes. But not a victory for consumers, who still can't get DSL because SBC sees no profit in providing it to them.
At bottom, the purpose of HB 1627 was political. Unhappy with how it has fared at the hands of the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission, SBC went to friends in the legislature seeking to mandate that the IURC be more favorable to the phone company in calculating the rate it can charge other companies for using its lines and equipment. The bill also would have served SBC by deregulating broadband high-speed Internet access and shortening the time SBC must wait in order to lure back customers.
It also would have served consumers, because SBC will be damned if it's going to build out DSL infrastructure so pukey out-of-state "broadband ISPs" can hijack its lines at cost without being forced to build their own infrastructure in a certain amount of time. SBC (or its predecessors) built the God-damn phone system, and they should be able to make a reasonable profit on it. I don't see Covad or WorldCom out here burying cable; they're parasites on SBC's back. SBC is not going to drop $500K per remote terminal to provide DSL to neighborhoods that are too far from the switch to get DSL if it can't be assured of making that money back in a reasonable amount of time.
IURC Chairman William McCarty maintains the commission has tried to meet its responsibility under federal law to protect the solvency of SBC, the former Ameritech, while promoting competition through the sharing of infrastructure that the company built in its days as a monopoly. There is no evidence the IURC has failed to carry out this balancing act better than a legislature that clearly tilts to one side.
Why should SBC have to share its infrastructure in the first place? What the IURC ought to do is completely deregulate the phone company. Let the best phone company win. We were better off in the monopoly days, folks. Some of us remember them well. I'll agree that allowing you to own your own phone was a plus. The rest of the breakup was a mistake.
I rarely side with monopolies, but this is one case where we'd be a lot better off with one.
