🚀 go-pugleaf

In <54pmaf$am9@samba.rahul.net>, Rahul Dhesi <dhesi@rahul.net> writes:

>There is no such price break.  ISPs pay business rates for business
>lines.  The journalist who wrote the article must have looked in some
>very strange place to find a *critic* of PacBell who agreed
>(erroneously) that ISPs enjoy a price break.

In "very strange places" like FCC tariffs and Notices of Proposed 
Rulemaking.  Does the phrase "modem tax" ring any bells?

>>In 1983, the Federal Communications Commission gave
>>companies that offered Internet services, and other ''enhanced service
>>providers,'' an exemption from the per-minute fees that other
>>companies, such as long-distance telephone companies, pay to use Pac
>>Bell's network.
>
>This is not true.  

As a matter of fact,  it is.  Companies like CompuServe,  Tymnet,  and 
others wangled themselves an exemption from the fees imposed on others who 
used the local PSTN as a "gateway" to their long-haul networks.  The only 
inaccuracy is that there was no one in that group that I know of providing 
ISP services at that time.

>Proposals to make ISPs pay per-minute charges to PacBell are simply a
>sneaky way of billing residential users indirectly for the outgoing
>calls they make.  It's politically hard to directly impose
>per-minute charges on residential users who have flat rate service,
>so telephone companies want to do it indirectly, by charging them through
>their ISPs.

Yup.  Otoh,  it's a fact that most of us using the net do consume more 
local telco resources than the typical residential customer.  While I'm a 
little leery (to put it mildly) of PacBell's rather hysterical claims, 
this is a genuine issue that does merit serious discussion.

Ran