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About a year ago, real Internet service arrived here. With a local call, I could do all that neat stuff I'd been reading about: send and receive e-mail to and from everywhere, surf the World Wide Web, glean information from newsgroups.
Naturally, that happy state of affairs was too good to endure. As this area grows, and as more people discover these delights, more people subscribe to the local node of Rocky Mountain Internet.
And so, the busy signals mount. Until about Labor Day, they were a rare annoyance; since then, they're a constant aggravation.
RMI says it's been trying to add more local lines, but runs into trouble getting USWest to provide the lines in a timely manner.
Although I'm usually dubious when one company blames another for a problem, I don't have any trouble believing RMI here.
For one thing, USWest wants to launch its own Internet services, so it's not in the corporate interest to provide good service to potential competitors.
For another, the current USWest corporate philosophy is to avoid investment in rural areas.
Why? Telephone service is becoming a competitive market. If USWest puts resources into rural areas, it won't have as much to invest in urban areas, where it has competition. Other companies will get this profitable trade.
The result is that USWest seems to have plenty of money for joint ventures with Time-Warner, directory publishing in Russia, cellular consortia in Chicago and Miami, and cable-TV systems in Atlanta, France and Great Britain.
But USWest can't seem to find the money to serve customers in Colorado. Instead, it wants to raise rates without adding services in rural Colorado. In other words, global capitalism requires investments in metropolitan areas from Moscow to Honolulu, rather than tending to customers at home.
One answer is competition, and we're getting that in Colorado. Well, some parts of Colorado. There are about a dozen companies that want your business if you're in the Denver Tech Center. Outside the standard metropolitan areas, there's USWest, the company that in just six months managed to accumulate 40,000 PUC rule violations, most relating to bad or delayed service.
Another solution is subsidy. The first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, realized that the free market would never hold this sprawling country together, and thus signed the Pacific Railroad Act in 1862. It provided extensive governmental subsidies, and that sort of thinking continued through Dwight Eisenhower and the interstate highway system.
Modern Republicans, though, are no longer nationalists, and since they're running things, we can scratch that possibility.
Another solution to monopoly is regulation, but these are deregulatory times. Our state legislature is supposed to look after our interests and perhaps maintain Colorado as a cohesive polity. But of the 100 legislators, only 10 are from rural areas, and when I ask my state senator, a Democrat, and my state representative, a Republican, they give the same answer -- 90 percent of the General Assembly doesn't know or care about anything in rural Colorado besides skiing or diverting more water.
My regulatory proposal is simple. Any company that wants to offer telephone service in Colorado will be required to offer it state-wide. Any service that is advertised anywhere in Colorado must be available to all -- if the local cable monopoly can find a way to deliver those glowing TV ads about wonderful services from USWest, then certainly the local phone monopoly can find a way to provide those services. If it can't, it shouldn't be allowed to do business in Colorado.
But it's probably too late for that, and USWest has a horde of lobbyists to make sure it can continue disinvesting in rural Colorado.
To move on, I'll tout a radio talk-show. It's a
five-part series called Conversations 2000,
hosted
by Clay Jenkinson, a classics scholar perhaps best known
for his impersonation of Thomas Jefferson.
Previous guests have included Peter Decker, former Colorado Commissioner of Agriculture, and Tom Tancredo, head of the Independence Institute in Golden.
It runs from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Wednesdays, and it's on public radio stations -- I know KUNC and KRCC carry it.
Weather and car permitting, I'll be on it tomorrow night, and if you get in the habit, you'll catch some real scholars -- Patty Limerick and Charles Wilkinson -- in the coming weeks.
You might even want to call in, assuming USWest will let you.
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