From: "Benjamin Kowarsch" <benjk@mac.com>
> On Friday, October 12, 2001, at 05:15 , Michael Turner wrote:
>
> > You must also win. And in any robbing-peter-to-pay-paul
> > scenario, governments do the popular thing, not necessarily
> > the thing that plays well with all industry segments. Intercontinental
> > roaming just doesn't buy you many votes.
>
> Well, "visited network charges" doesn't rob Peter to pay Paul.
To be clear: the EU is going after telcos -- presumably on the behalf
of a non-telco corporate constituency -- to allow competitive price
pressure to go to work on roaming. They must think it's because
telcos are cream-skimming profit. If they succeed, it hits the telco
bottom line. These companies aren't doing too well as a group
these days, and may petition the government for relief in some
other way, eventually if not sooner. I.e., consumers might, instead
of paying higher roaming charges, simply pay higher taxes (taxes
that the telcos have been relieved of, and that have to be made up
in some other way.)
Peter and Paul are not, in my theft analogy, two participating telcos,
but rather the telcos vs. the consumers. With government acting
as fence, if you will.
And again, I wasn't addressing the transcontinental case, but the
intercontinental case. Yes, Europe sees a lot of international
tourism, and this turns into roaming income I'm sure, but a lot
of that international tourism is European-country-to-European
country. I.e., transcontinental. And therefore mostly within
a recognized political unit, which matters for my argument.
As this is the keitai-l list, I am, of course, trying to stay on-topic,
so I want to know how all this really affects the average Japanese
mobile phone user. Just as European restaurants often have the
Japanese-tourist menu, I'm sure some way will be worked out to
soak the Japanese-tourist phone user. If you wish to pointedly
avoid the political dimension, we'll be talking past each other
for a long time, but I think it matters that Japanese people don't
vote on European political matters. If the EU is litigating
on roaming, on behalf of European consumer interests, I'm sure
all parties will find at least one point of agreement: it's OK to
make as much money as possible from non-EU citizens, with taxes
not being an option. That leaves service charges.
[enormous commentary of questionable keitai relevance, snipped]
> ....your Peter and Paul analogy, I guess there are too many Peters
> and too few Pauls in this case.
Fit Mary in there somewhere, and you can really make whatever
you want of an analogy that you didn't interpret correctly in the
first place.
-michael turner
leap@gol.com
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Received on Fri Oct 12 18:32:05 2001