« Judge Reggie to the Rescue | Main | What if they were Jewish cartoons? »

February 03, 2006

Bulldozing the Freeway

Okay, I realize I-90 is a toll road, not a freeway, but this rapid privitization of interstates is just a stupid idea. As if 10 cents a mile for gas was not enough:


Cash-Strapped States Eye Tollway Leases

Indiana officials hope to sign a lease this spring with a Spanish-Australian partnership that would operate the toll road for a profit for the next 75 years.

The company would keep all toll revenue. In return, it would be responsible for maintenance, improvements and other operating costs, and would pay the state $3.85 billion up front — money that would go toward other road and bridge projects.

If state lawmakers approve the deal, it will be the biggest highway-privatization in the country and could embolden other states to enter into similar arrangements.

"At last, we can stop dreaming and start digging," Gov. Mitch Daniels said last week. The Republican has hailed the transaction as "the Louisiana Purchase of our time for Indiana."

Isn't there a saying? "When you're in a hole, first you have to...."

In their own brave effort to place as many stumbling blocks as possible in the path of our economy, Congress is going the distance, too:


The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.

Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are developing strategies that would track and store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency. According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets--corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers--would get preferred treatment. Content from these providers would have first priority on our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out.

Under the plans they are considering, all of us--from content providers to individual users--would pay more to surf online, stream videos or even send e-mail. Industry planners are mulling new subscription plans that would further limit the online experience, establishing "platinum," "gold" and "silver" levels of Internet access that would set limits on the number of downloads, media streams or even e-mail messages that could be sent or received.

To make this pay-to-play vision a reality, phone and cable lobbyists are now engaged in a political campaign to further weaken the nation's communications policy laws. They want the federal government to permit them to operate Internet and other digital communications services as private networks, free of policy safeguards or governmental oversight. Indeed, both the Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are considering proposals that will have far-reaching impact on the Internet's future. Ten years after passage of the ill-advised Telecommunications Act of 1996, telephone and cable companies are using the same political snake oil to convince compromised or clueless lawmakers to subvert the Internet into a turbo-charged digital retail machine.

The telephone industry has been somewhat more candid than the cable industry about its strategy for the Internet's future. Senior phone executives have publicly discussed plans to begin imposing a new scheme for the delivery of Internet content, especially from major Internet content companies. As Ed Whitacre, chairman and CEO of AT&T, told Business Week in November, "Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment, and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes free is nuts!"


Posted by Mike at February 3, 2006 12:30 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.topdog08.com/cgi-bin/mt-trackback.cgi/924

Comments

Post a comment

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)


Remember me?