i'm supposed to be mad at teksavvy, but i'm seeing through it and am pissed at cogeco - double for trying to get me pissed at teksavvy.

basically, cogeco just didn't respond to the request for a hookup. so i got stuck at the end of the queue. this has been happening to other people. it's a conscious attempt by the companies that own the lines to coerce customers back into their arms.

the telecommunications situation in canada is pretty awful and i think just about everybody realizes it. the predictable response is for greater markets. more competition. well, if it wasn't for these other companies, i wouldn't be getting a better deal, right? i'd be stuck overpaying cogeco for shitty access, right? hooray for markets, right? let's open it up further. more competition will bring the price down...

ugh. idiots.

i think we can all agree that the problem is the oligopoly that exists, but what seems to fly over people's heads is that the problem is rooted in private ownership of the lines. you can open up the market forever, create infinitely many service providers, but if the lines remain under the ownership of a single company then there's nothing that can be done to resolve the price gouging. the infrastructure is inherently monopolistic.

i don't need to go very far left to get a reasonable answer. none other than that paragon of liberal free market theory, adam smith, was well aware that some services cannot operate under a market. forget about whether or not markets work (of course, they don't). markets in certain things are impossible. roads, for example. liberals once included power generation and phone lines in this list. you can add cable lines in. there's going to be a monopoly, whether market fundamentalists like it or not. the choice is between a public and a private monopoly.

we should really be thinking of cable lines the same way we think of roads. they should be publicly owned and administered through taxation. this would actually succeed in bringing the price down by cutting out the profit motive.

so, i'm hereby calling for the nationalization of the cable system.