NOOOOOOOO

[Mark J. Dulcey]

Jerry Feldman wrote:
> On Tue, 27 Mar 2007 09:02:35 -0400 (EDT)
> gboyce <gboyce at badbelly.com> wrote:
> 
>> Speakeasy has been purchased by Best Buy:
>>
>> http://www.speakeasy.net/press/pr/pr032707.php
> The upside of this is it is being run as a wholly owned subsidiary. 

What worries me most about the press release is that it's all about 
business, business, business. There is one passing nod to "tech-savvy 
professionals"; aside from that, non-business customers never get 
mentioned at all. It makes me wonder whether Speakeasy's future will 
have them abandoning non-business customers altogether, leaving us at 
the mercy of the cable/telco duopoly.

Now, it may be true that it would have happened anyway, whether or not 
Speakeasy was bought by Best Buy or anybody else. The telcos have never 
been thrilled about the idea of allowing third-party providers on their 
lines; the thought of having to share control and profits with another 
company seems to be anathema to them. Now that the FCC under the Bush 
administration has deregulated such offerings, we might well see CLECs 
(competitive local exchange carriers; i.e., companies that offer 
services over lines provided by the RBOCs) forced out of business by 
telcos that either refuse to sell them services at all or only offer 
services at prohibitively high rates. Speakeasy's days as a consumer ISP 
might end the day that Covad's existing contracts with the telcos do.

But then where do we go? I'm not thrilled about a future where my only 
service choices are from companies that won't let me run my own servers, 
block ports at their whim, cut off customers based on unpublished 
criteria, and don't guarantee to offer free and equal access to any 
sites that I choose to visit. The Internet that Verizon and Comcast want 
to offer isn't the Internet that I want to be a part of; my Internet 
doesn't have second-class citizens, which is the only sort that they 
want to allow me to be.

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