Use the Kelo Decision on the Telcos

• Andy Kessler says "start with this line: "Economic underdevelopment and stagnation are also threats to the public sufficient to make their removal cognizable as a public purpose."" In the NFIB mag this month, there are many stories of eminent domain abuse. Let's use the law to help the consumer for a change.
• Andy continues: "Forget the argument that telcos need to be guaranteed a return on investment or they won't upgrade our bandwidth. No one guarantees Intel a return before they spend billions in R&D on their next Pentium chip to beat their competitors at AMD. No one guarantees Cisco a return on their investment before they deploy their next router to beat Juniper. In real, competitive markets, the market provides access to capital."
• Techdirt says: "Throttling the free use of the Internet in the US would slow down not only VoIP but also slow the growth of IPTV. While they’re at it, the telcos, whose current business model is broken, would like to insert themselves as toll collectors between you and Google."
• Andy again: "Reality check: why doesn’t your landline phone do most of the things your cellphone does? It doesn’t have to worry about either battery life or size? The reason is that it’s attached to the traditional phone network on which innovation simply can’t happen. Telcos would like to make the Internet a similar innovation-free and profit-safe zone.
• Tom Evslin points out: "But plenty of smart people – perhaps represented best by Martin Geddes – argue that a net neutrality law would be counterproductive. Turns out that neutrality itself is very hard to define.
• Tom again: "Countries with true telecommunications competition – now including most of Western Europe and especially Great Britain – don’t have net neutrality legislation. Nor do they have a net neutrality problem.
• Me: [THE PROBLEM ISN'T REALLY NET NEUTRALITY IT IS A SERIOUS LACK OF COMPETITION. BOTH CABLE & TELCO DON'T WANT TO CHANGE THEIR NON-INNOVATIVE, BORING BUSINESS MODEL]. Techdirt continues this POV.