re: Obama's plan to save the internet draws bold reactions

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But the Internet cannot function as a public utility.

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First, public utilities don’t serve the public; they serve themselves, usually by maneuvering through Byzantine regulations that they helped craft.

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Utilities are about tariffs, rate bases, price caps and other chokeholds that kill real price discovery

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You know what also kills real price discovery? A market with only one seller.

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I would know; I used to work for AT&T in the early 1980s when it was a phone utility.

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Oh, well, if he would know then I guess it's settled!

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More utility follies? The first cellphone call was made in St. Louis in 1946 with AT&T’s Mobile Telephone Service, but the company let the innovation wither. It took until 1983 for Motorola to introduce the now comically unwieldy DynaTAC

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What?! I guess I should expect this sort of bullshite from a WSJ writer trying to write about technology. AT&T's "Mobile Telephone Service" was basically a walkie-talkie, only 3 people in a city could use the service at the same time, and the equipment weighed 80 fricking pounds. Not so "mobile", huh? Yeah, it took nearly 4 decades to make it portable. Not because of "utility follies", but because it was a gigantic technological leap made up of thousands of smaller leaps that took a long time to develop. And the DynaTAC is only "comically unwieldy" compared to today's phones. At the time, the DynaTAC was a technological marvel that was 40 years better than AT&T's "mobile telephone service".

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If the Internet is reclassified as a utility, online innovation will slow to the same glacial pace that beset AT&T and other utilities, with all the same bad incentives. Research will focus on ways to bill you—as wireless companies do with calling and data plans—rather than new services.

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So, if I follow his logic here, if we classify the internet as a utility, then companies will focus on ways to bill us, and his example for that is that wireless companies, which are NOT classified as utilities, do it? What a fricking hack.