Submitted by Robb Topolski, Aug 5, 2008 23:06

Sir, I'm with you! I don't want any government regulation of broadband, either. However, it is the dismal lack of competition in broadband that forces me to ask for it. Most addresses in America have no choice among broadband providers -- they are either served by a Cable provider or a Telco provider. The lucky among us have a choice between the two. Ten percent of Americans cannot get broadband, according to the GAO. DSL is only available to 40 percent of telephone subscribers, and cable tends to stick close to town — the dividing line between the have and have nots being the center stripe across the highway. And degregulation of DSL and Brand-X for Cable have chased out any pretense of competition. We're stuck only with the owners of the wires (despite the fact that they're laid across our property and public rights-of-way). In such an environment, a provider has no competition to keep him honest. Indeed that's exactly what happened with Comcast, who hid a device in their network that secretly took back bandwidth its customers had pre-paid for! And they did so for a long time before getting finally caught. With competition missing, government has to fill the gap. And even though the Internet already has international governance bodies, none have enforcement powers. That's why the FCC had to act.

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