robbed by the FCC...

Yes, the American consumers consumers were robbed by the FCC from cheaper Internet-access and communication charges. Instead, the FCC ended up making the two telecom giants get a tighter grip on the consumers than ever before with the spectrum auction's results.

Mobile-phone companies have long opposed open access. Verizon even sued the FCC last year in a bid to block a move toward open access. It failed, then did an about-face, promising to open its network to third-party devices and applications in the future.

Verizon wireless was awarded the largest chunk of the spectrum auction and also, allowed to make a decision about accessibility to its spectrum by others. This is not in line with what Google tried to petition against.

The Economist notes:
"ONE of the dirtiest tricks played on American consumers is the way their country’s mobile-phone companies force them to use phones sold through the companies’ stores, then lock them into two-year contracts with punitive cancellation fees. Asians and Europeans—who can take their mobiles from one provider to another, and use them on different networks around the world—shake their heads in amazement at Americans’ meek acceptance of such anti-competitive practices."

As it is the interest-rate cuts have been making me skeptical about allowance for market forces to thrive by themselves. The spectrum auction fiasco further disturbs me as bureaucratic intervention and incestuous relationships have created this broad daylight robbery from the consumers!

neo biz harp

It is fairly apparent that my exams are over. :P

The Verizon article in WSJ today morning made me log this post. Verizon wants to get into gaming and other stuff in order to capture value of the market they are creating. Stupid ! - they didn't play it safe like AT&T. Their top managers shouted from the top of their lungs that ATT will find it difficult to expand capacities later on. Expand for who? AT&T spent only 4.3 b whereas Verizon spent 20b. A huge committment doesn't always result in a huge return. Verizon has several plans but the original visionaries of the FiOS deal are still around - ask them and they seem to be scared. Scared that their plans may not pan out what they originally planned it for.

For instance, in the gaming space, there is already this company in place: Digital Chocolate. Name of the company aptly suits it as it is going to indulge public in mass-consumption of the cellphone gaming.

Podshow is another firm which will take major piece of the content provision pie in this convergence game. It will be mostly the non Verizon firms which will come in and derive value from the high bandwidth networks made available. How can Verizon stop them from free-riding? Differential QoS is already in doubts due to the whole net-neutrality saga.

There is no point for Verizon to spend so much on the backbone in order to create such large networks which will eventually be used by others. One conspiracy theorist mentions to me that the person who politically forwarded this decision for laying out the fiber had personal interests in the entire affair. Neither the shareholders nor the BoD were convinced about this. So, what does a shareholder do? Sell !

btw, other neo-biz which excited me recently were: Tell Me, Akimbo, Good Technology

Tell Me: has created this seemingly huge platform already. Slowly, steadily, they plan to takeover. Before we even knew, they have 35 m folks working on their systems daily ! They arent the state of the art but they have been able to capture the market relatively fast. Personally, I love the Tmobile IVS - its awesome !!! However, in this world where network externalities come into play - Tell Me may start to rule !

Akimbo: Your wish is on demand ! This continues in my line of harp - IPTV and the digital convergence. Akimbo is well-positioned to take advantage ...they might be little too late to create a lock-in with set top boxes similar to those of 2Wire's or Scientific Atlanta's. However, they are making sure that they have the content !

Good Technology: got acquired by Motorola - dayyuuummm ! Motorola's fatherhood may either provide a huge impetus or suffocate this new startup's spirit. Let us see what happens. Good Technology take advantage of the fact that there are more cell phones than personal computers !

Now, I need to get going to prepare for an engagement tomorrow !