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Originally Posted by cpayne5
I find it funny that you're lauding the efforts of Apple and Amazon. They are building their business around exactly what you despise; purchased content.  |
I don't despise purchased content at all. On the contrary I love it. I currently have subscriptions to Netflix, Hulu, CrunchyRoll, Rhapsody, and starting in the next day or two NHL Gamecenter. In part because they provide a reasonably priced, yet valuable service that meets my needs.
Alright Gamecenter might be overpriced but at no more then $10 a month for all the other subscriptions. And when Amazon Prime creates a PS3 app I'll probably get a subscription to their service.
What I despise is the old model that the studios and record companies don't want to let go of. $10 movie ticket, $20 DVD (with tons of unstoppable previews), $15 CD supplemented by suing senior citizens and teens for file sharing.
Still I don't understand why we have monopolistic competition and Europe has pure competition. After all they're the socialist.
Op-Ed Columnist - The Comeback Continent - NYTimes.com
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Meanwhile, Europe’s Internet lag is a thing of the past. The dial-up Internet of the 1990s was dominated by the United States. But as dial-up has given way to broadband, Europe has more than kept up. The number of broadband connections per 100 people in the 15 countries that were members of the European Union before it was enlarged in 2004, is slightly higher than in the U.S. — and Europe’s connections are both substantially faster and substantially cheaper than ours.
I don’t want to exaggerate the good news. Europe continues to have many economic problems. But who doesn’t? The fact is that Europe’s economy looks a lot better now — both in absolute terms and compared with our economy — than it did a decade ago.
What’s behind Europe’s comeback? It’s a complicated story, probably involving a combination of deregulation (which has expanded job opportunities) and smart regulation. One of the keys to Europe’s broadband success is that unlike U.S. regulators, many European governments have promoted competition, preventing phone and cable companies from monopolizing broadband access.
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That last sentence is exactly the opposite of whats happened state side and now these same ISP's want to end net neutrality which according to silicon valley is a terrible idea and one that apparently Republicans are all to eager to put into play. (Enron anyone?)