Fergie's Tech Blog

EarthLink: Bells Must Share Broadband Networks

Yeah, right.

Earthlink has a snowball's chance in hell of getting that enacted. The way things stand today, the lawmakers in this country will enact laws which completely favor the telcos.

Anne Broache writes on C|Net News:

Federal regulators acted illegally by not forcing the Bell companies to share their broadband networks with competitors, EarthLink told a federal appeals court on Tuesday.

The 20-minute oral arguments before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit dealt with a legal challenge filed last year by the Atlanta-based Internet service provider against the Federal Communications Commission.

The suit was prompted by the FCC's 2004 decision to exempt Verizon, BellSouth, Qwest and what was then SBC Communications from a portion of a 1996 federal telecommunications law that generally requires such incumbent carriers to "unbundle," or share, certain broadband elements of their networks with potential new competitors.

posted by Fergie @ 5/09/2006 03:15:00 PM