The telephone industry has a history of outsiders helping them
deal with this problem through introducing new technology.
A century or so ago, when we had Real Telephone Companies
which used operators to connect phone calls,
a Kansas City undertaker named Strowger suspected that
one of his competitors was bribing the phone operators to
divert calls from potential customers.
So he invented a machine to connect telephone calls,
the "step by step" switch, driven by electric pulses
from what eventually became the phone dial.
I'm having trouble remembering my Official TPC History,
but either Strowger tried to sell it to the Bell companies,
they decided nobody'd want such a lame interface instead of Operators,
so he sold it to Western Union, where it was such an obviously big
economic win that Bell had to pay them to license it for 17 years,
or possibly the other way around.
Now we've got more technical versions of the same problem,
and it seems that it's all suspicion and the phone companies
are having trouble tracing it. Perhaps it's Las Vegas's
local telephone monopoly, which was fairly incompetent before
Sprint bought it, but the article sounded like it could
just as well be hotel PBXs, which are much less competently administered
and much more susceptible to bribery.
One obvious solution to the problem would be for customers to
use cell phones, but that's more likely to show up on a bill that
somebody will question than "local call 75 cents" or free local calls
at hotels, so there's a certain disincentive.
At 11:58 PM 05/14/2001 -0500, Jim Choate wrote:
>On Mon, 14 May 2001, Sandy Sandfort wrote:
> > Inchoate again reveals his remarkable lack of analysis AND imagination by
> > asking:
> >
> > > I wonder how C-A-C-L philosophy would solve this problem...
> > >
> > > http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/18950.html
> >
> > This a problem that arises when you have a monopoly enforced by government
> > guns. In a truly free market, the aggrieved party could take his phone
> > provider to arbitration for breach of contract. QED, doofus.
>
>This is a problem that arises because people are greedy and recognize the
>profit potential in a captured market. Blaiming it on the government is
>simply a silly knee-jerk reaction with no reasoning or analysis behind it.
