unido & commercial use (really choice of models of society)

[Bo Thide']

In article <60 at loria.crin.fr> tombre at weissenburger.crin.fr (Karl Tombre) writes:
>This discussion has quickly evolved into a discussion about models of society.
>All the technical reasons for the pricing practices here on Eunet have
>been given now, I think. Basically, we can say that the problem comes
>from monopolies and high telecom pricings. Now, a lot of people
>(especially from the USA) have condemned these monoplies over here in
>Europe and praised free competition. BUT I think there is a choice of
>the model of society you wish which lies behind all that.

In the ongoing discussion I think it is important not to compare Europe (a
very heterogeneous group of nations with different political systems etc)
to the USA.  For instance, Sweden has among the lowest phone rates in
the world.  At the same time Sweden has more phones per capita than
any other country and has phone communications digitized to 99%.

By comparing with friends that live in West Germany (where the number of
phones is much lower and where digitization has just started) but otherwise
have similar phone habits as myself, I have noticed that pay typically 3-4
times as much per month as I do.  Sweden has a state-owned phone company
that operates as an ordinary private company but where Swewdish Parliament
very often has a final say on the minimum level of service and maximum
charges for the customers -- the phone users.  Interestingly
enough, Swedish Telecom is now rapidly abandoning more and more of 
its monopoly status allowing other companies to operate things like mobile
telephone services (a *very* big thing over here) and to sell phone equipment
etc.

One thing that happened with this change of policy was that the
price for installing a telephone in your summer house was brought up
to "market level" -- an increase by several THOUSANDS of percent in many cases
compared to the earlier rather low fixed rate of about $50-$100.
However, in certain other aspects I think we will gain from this less
rigid monopoly.

Regarding e-mail, this is a service that is free of all user and other
charges for anybody working in universities (which are all heavily
subsidised by tax money).  The University even pays my extra private phone
line I have installed at home exculsively for modem connections to any
computer I like.

-Bo