In fact, divorce lawyers have been known to successfully subpoena records of highway toll transponders (EZ-Pass), to produce evidence of the driver going someplace where they may have been having an affair.

The whole GPS tracking thing is pure Big Brother, and I don't mean the TV show.

Yes, BT's model is good. It's functional separation, not structural: They're separate subsidiaries of the same corporate shell, so the debt is consolidated under the same stock. But it still is open and accountable, so the infrastructure could be done by an OpenReach-like operation. BT seems fairly happy with it; it actually improves bottom-line profits.

The American phone companies, of course, are totally aghast at the idea. They're more into control than profitability.

Propertarian: A belief that private property has primacy over public good. In telecom it is the notion that because the wires on the poles are the nominal property of the telephone companies, those companies should be free to do with them exactly as they feel. Utility regulation and hundreds of years of related laws (bailment, etc.) are discarded in favor of declaring everything to be somebody's property, and thus theirs to use as they feel free.

That is the philosophy that Kevin Martin and Michael Powell followed at the FCC, deregulating the incumbent telephone companies in spite of the law.

The majority of wealth comes from one choice alone: Choosing wealthy parents. I choose not to reward that.

Go back to your Objectivist reading club.

What good is fiber to the home if it's closed?

The Bush FCC (Powell/Martin) deregulated fiber to the home, even if the incumbent Bell pulled it and cut the old copper wire. So the telephone company is the sole ISP, the sole content provider, and the sole telephone service provider. They have (for various legal and political reasons) not exercised their full rights yet, but they are studying ways to make fiber to the home about as useful and free as the WAP browser on your wireless handset, just with better resolution on the movies they sell you.

The fiber has to be open (not "network neutrality" of ISPs, but open to multiple ISPs) or it will be less useful than old copper. Freedom of the press with black-and-white pamphlets is better than a full-color broadsheet (with comics!) monopoly of Izvestia.

The problem with current telecom policy is that it presupposes that the old incumbent telephone companies (ILECs) "own" the wires that they installed with monopoly-ratepayer money, but due to the presence of nominal competition (cable), they no longer need to be regulated as utilities. So giving them more money simply raises their profits. It raises the price they pay to buy each other up. Right now the going rate is around $3000/subscriber to buy up a rural telephone company that gets >50% of its revenue from government subsidies. They're simply bidding on the present value of these entitlements. It goes straight to the investment bankers (Goldman Sachs has been making a lot off of the subsidized-ILEC business.)

The FreePress plan is awful too. It simply ignores the ILEC networks and supposes that a few billion dollars could create a "third path", another closed, propertarian network. Of course they also want Internet content to be regulated, so their plan loses on both angles. They just hate the cable industry and collaborate with the Bells against it, consumers being a low priority.

So what might work? I suggest that the feds use the money to finance the spin-out of the ILECs' outside plant -- the loops and short-haul links between their central office buildings -- into neutral "LoopCos". They would provide wholesale access to any LEC, ISP or cableco, including their former owners, on vendor-neutral terms. LoopCos would be strictly regulated utilities (like telcos 25 years ago), forbidden from competing with their customers. Then the stimulus money could be used to finance (low interest loan, subsidies in high-cost areas) an upgrade of their legacy networks to provide (dark) fiber to the home.

The old legacy LEC (ATT, VZ, Q) shareholders would win, because a lot of their debt would move to the LoopCos, where it would be diluted by stimulus money. The Internet and its users would win because we'd have real open-entry competition, not a duopoly.

Then, when the Second Great Depression leaves a 40% unemployment rate, you and your few remaining rich friends with their inherited cash and other still-liquid assets will have a really easy time getting lots of servants to work for you for a pittance!

I use Access pretty much daily and have found nothing like it; while its big huge queries are slow (because the Jet engine is pretty lame), it is astonishingly easy to be productive with it, especially with complex multi-table relational databases.

I tried OOo Base and couldn't get it to do anything. Well, maybe the proverbial "I have ten bottles of wine in my collection" one-table demo, but it didn't seem to do much more than that. Oh, it could hang up like a broken driver if I tried to import an MDB from Access.

What's the secret of getting Base to do anything that couldn't be done more easily with something sophisticated like, say, Notepad?

I've read the Free Press proposal. I'm in the business, know the economics, have done some detailed studies of the Universal Service Fund (what a joke!), and recognize a mess when I see one.

First off, they're overly impressed by speed. They want 50/5 Mbps all over. You need that for three streams of HDTV via Internet, but not much else. They are out to hurt cable, and probably don't understand the nature of the copyright issues that rule those industries. They also ignore the issues facing rural providers, connecting them to the backbone, where current rules let the big Bells gouge small companies (some of whom pass the bill on to the Universal Service Fund). And where's the cost-benefit analysis? USF finances ridiculous boondoggles today. (They finance over $200k PER HOME to Sandwich Isles Communications.) Do we need more?

In fact they explicitly disclaim telecom competition as opened by the Telecom Act of 1996, favoring instead a massive expenditure on a "third pipe" closed approach, as if a triopoly were all that much better than a duopoly. In other words, it's "f* you" to the ISPs.

They have detailed plans to spend the money, but their details reflect a lack of understanding of what the actual costs and needs are. Too much here, too little there. It's like they're taking random numbers and throwing them out there, because that's how pork barrel politics works.

Their plan is classic inside-the-beltway "I want mine" thinking. It's not a good way to improve Internet access; it's a way to make some rich telephone companies richer, leaving a big bill for us to pay later.