Do people even realize why those numbers are being blocked (and why AT&T and others wanted to block them)? It's because they're conference-call scams, taking advantage of the government regulations on rural interchange fees.

The government subsidizes rural phone companies by allowing them to charge much higher interchange fees. This is meant to subsidize the high fixed costs of providing phone lines in the remote areas with low density. The interchange fees are substantially higher than the marginal cost of providing a minute of services, but are set up so that with normal call volume they cover the fixed price of line maintenance, etc.

What some of the rural phone companies and certain customers realized was that they could set up "free conference-call" numbers abusing these regulations and the prevalence of unlimited calling plans. They allow people from all over the country to call one of their special numbers to set up a conference call, allowing people to call in for free. The conference call company and the rural phone company split the absurdly high interchange fees, which are much greater than their costs of hosting the call. Free profit by driving up their call volume to provide conference calls to people who don't live in their calling area. Profit that they'd never get except for regulations designed to ensure phone service to people who do live in their rural calling area.

"If you own one of these 100 numbers or are calling one of these numbers then your choices are restricted based on a corporate decision, not freedom of choice by the end user."

If you own one of these 100 numbers or are calling one of them, then your choices are restricted based on the fact that you're trying to participate in the abuse the regulations in a legal scam. Granted, people calling in to the number often don't realize that regulation abuse is going on, they just know that they're getting a good deal on free conference calling.

I understand why the telcos want Google to face the same restrictions as they do, though I think that these calls should be blocked, or else the rural subsidies should just go away.

"If the antitrust exemption is removed, competition would increase in every region of the United States -- insurers would have real, viable competition to deal with in their primary zones, and premiums would likely fall substantially."

You have no idea what you're talking about. The antitrust exemption is a *federal* exemption; states can still use antitrust laws if they want. In any case, removing the antitrust exemption still won't change the more important problem with competition-- it will still be illegal to buy health insurance from another state. *That* is what causes all the state monopolies. The federal antitrust exemption works because there is *no* United States of America insurance market; just a collection of 50 state markets, each regulated independently, with some holding companies that operate in multiple states.

More importantly, removing the federal antitrust exemption could actually *reduce* competition. The federal antitrust exemption allows small insurers from different states to pool data with each other; without it, they wouldn't be able to collect the actuarial data necessary to compete with the large, multi-state behemoth holding companies.

"All other countries subsidize their businesses to compete with the US, its time for us to cut all taxes on business who keep jobs in the US, and double the tax on those who send them overseas. That will fix the economy, period."

No, that will cause all US companies to divest themselves of foreign subsidiaries, selling them to foreign companies. It won't cause the jobs to come back to this country, though, it only means that the profits will be going to foreign companies and taxed *only* by foreign governments, not by the US at all. That would also kill GM, since it would have to sell off its profitable Latin American and Chinese divisions that sell cars to countries in those areas.

It would only be a recipe for foreign multinationals to dominate the world economy.

"SHOW ME WHAT CHINA BUYS FROM US OTHER THEN OUR TREASURY SECURITIES."

They used to buy our Nylon. But thanks to people like you, they won't any more.

"We hope, though, that Congress would be able to craft some sort of social initiative or outreach program to overcome whatever roadblocks -- whether economic, cultural, or otherwise -- that stand between the unconnected and broadband bliss."

Why? It's one thing if people can't afford it or it isn't available, but if people just plain don't want it, then why the re-education program? It would be like Congress having a special program to make sure that everyone gets cable TV or watches the NFL.

You're falling victim to the temptation of assuming that everyone else is or should be just like you, and is *wrong* if they want to be different.

First off, regular old DAB is crap. Of course, that has in large part to do with the spec being started back in the '80s, but the error protection schemes are archaic. The system arguably (especially as deployed) is arguably worse than plain old FM. DAB+ fixes a lot of the problems, though, as do other modern competing standards.

Second, most of these comments ignore the history of the spectrum use. US standards bodies tend to create standards that don't use frequencies already used by other US standards; European standards do the same for European uses. In the case of DAB, some of the popular required bands are used for other things in the USA. For example, Band II is the VHF band used for regular VHF analog TV broadcasts. Most European countries used VHF for black and white broadcasts in now obsolete formats and then when they moved to color switched standards to PAL (or SECAM) on UHF frequencies. The US stuck with VHF because we used a color NTSC standard fully backwards compatible with the old black and white broadcasts. This means that the oldest and strongest TV stations are VHF in the US, unlike in Europe where everything was UHF.

Third World countries are more likely to have unused frequencies simply because they have less uses. It's the same reason that Japan and South Korea have also operated on their own special frequencies for many things, including cellular. They had too many incumbent technologies on the "international" frequencies.

Lastly, it's hilarious to see completely European-invented standards described as global or international, only because the EU consists of many different countries, even at times when the standards cover fewer people than US standards. In 2006, despite DAB having been around for a long time, only about 500 million people were theoretically in range of a DAB station, with real coverage only extending to the UK (where sound quality was often worse than FM stations, due to compression choices of the MP2s) and Denmark. That's not that much more than the entire North American population. There's also only about 20-30 countries really deploying DAB; if we counted each US state separately, you could get similar claims that any US standards was "international." And of course any single-Chinese standard would cover even more people than many of these "international" standards.

If you hate anyone, you should hate the NFL as well. The NFL decided that DirecTV's money is worth more than not pissing off fans who don't want to switch.

"Whatever that ungodly amount might be, I find it hard to believe it has a n y t h i n g to do with current or future subscribers of a competing service."

The point is that DirecTV has to make it worth it to the NFL to have the exclusive deal. The more subscribers on other services, the more the other services would be willing to pay the NFL if they had Sunday Ticket. The more money the other services would bring to the table if DirecTV were non-exclusive, the more DirecTV has to pay the NFL to keep it exclusive.

However, eventually it would hit a tipping point and exclusivity wouldn't be worth it anymore.

That's 69,000 FIOS TV subs, but it's really misleading as only a very small part of these territories even have FIOS. Those employees are mostly to service phone and DSL lines. This consists of various isolated and sometimes rural former GTE areas that Verizon wants to get rid of.

"Western" does belong in quotes, as quite a few of the GTE territories were in the Southeast as well, like in NC and SC. For example, for some reason Durham, NC was a GTE territory, never AT&T/SouthernBell/BellSouth/AT&T again. Durham isn't rural either, but it is a small pocket of service in the middle of a big swath of AT&T.

But yeah, this is basically divesting a lot of the old GTE locations.