🚀 go-pugleaf

In <Pine.GUL.3.95.961024202749.24299C-100000@Networking.Stanford.EDU>
Rich Graves <llurch@Networking.Stanford.EDU> writes:

>BY HOWARD BRYANT
>Mercury News Staff Writer

>But rather than being a sign of imminent collapse, critics called Pac
>Bell's startling statistic a trumped-up charge designed to scare the
>public and pressure federal regulators into ending a price break
>Internet service providers enjoy when tying into Pac Bell's network.

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 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.  ISPs pay tariffed business rates for tariffed business
lines, like anybody else does.  They are not getting any special price
break.

The per-minute fees imposed on long-distance telephone companies are not
for receiving calls.  These fees are applied to a long-distance company
when it completes a long-distance connection between two central
offices.  This is a totally different tariff from the business line
tariff.

The access charge paid by long-distance companies is purely a mechanism
for making long-distance charges subsidize local service.  It's
deceptive to claim that long-distance companies are paying PacBell for
using PacBell's network.

I'm shocked that a Mercury News writer is using such inaccurate and
misleading language, apparently without fully understanding the issues.

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.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi <dhesi@rahul.net>
   I have this idea for a new toy called a 'Journalist-in-a-Box'.  When
   you open the box it pops up and yells 'Child pornography!'.