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Comparing it to free to air in Australia the Government gave away the extra bandwidth created by the advent of digital, to the existing providers. I think it would have been better to auction it. This is going off on a tangent. However the internet in today's world is an essential service, like the mail used to be. Maybe loosen the regulation around mail and tighten them a little on the internet. It just seems to me like maybe the customers would be better off if you severed the two things. The delivery of packets as one market place and all the other services that use it doing the other. But in a way that would stifle innovation as there might be more efficient ways of doing things. Somebody might create a broadcast protocol for the internet to start delivering the same thing at the same time to a lot of people. The current TCP/IP isn't the most efficient way. It is meant to be the most robust way of delivering point to point services, whereas a broadcast type situation, you'd have to have one slot on the server for each recipient. That's clearly not very efficient, and that's multiplied by the number of times it has to be relayed. So you have these identical packets being thrown out en masse out over the network. Proxies would make a lot of sense but wouldn't work for a real time thing. You could go on...this is just one example, but other innovations such as features for security, reliable real time delivery could make the network that much more valuable. You'd be pretty scared if they were doing an operation on someone using the internet. The internet has one minute 30 second stops (little congestion events) so for some applications like telemedicine it would be useful to have a different architecture. So maybe a hybrid architecture would be useful. It is just so much more efficient having this multipurpose thing. There are private networks. But I agree on the one hand you don't want to stifle innovation, but you can become quite cynical by the behaviour you observe by the different companies. Digital TV works the way the networks wanted it to work definitely at the expense of the consumer. Capitalism can be haphazard and inefficient.

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