The regional Bell operating companies (RBOC’s) are lying to us and to Congress and regulators about their business. That’s the gist of an outstanding report from the New Networks Institute. These lies have stifle competition in the broadband Internet access industry and will almost certainly result in local broadband monopolies and duopolies.
The RBOC’s and other other access monopolists have already demonstrated their vision of the future of Internet access. So far we have seen:
- extra charges for access to non-RBOC mail servers
- extra charges for VPN access
- censorship of the information you can access
- inability to serve web pages from your computer
- uncontrolled filtering of your email
- inability to share your line with other wireless users
- limitations on protocols and software that you can use to access the Net or other computers on it (e.g. no P2P)
- arbitrary bandwidth limitations
- metered bandwidth
That’s just off the top of my head. There may be more examples.