Q: Are you saying that Verizon (or whoever) is going to go bankrupt?

A: No, we are not making predictions about particular companies. We are saying that there are structural problems with the telecommunications industry as a whole.

Q: What interests does your group represent?

A: We are in no way an organized group. Generally, we are "net heads" - Internet businesspeople, consultants and analysts - who believe that the future of telecommunications will inevitably be via the Internet. We think it better if we get there sooner rather than later.

Q: Why have some non-Americans signed?

A: Because the 'net erases borders, and because people from other countries benefit when progress occurs in the U.S. Metcalfe's Law states that the 'net gains value as the square of people attached to it. Reed's Law is stronger, N to the N. So if U.S. connections are impoverished, everybody all around the world loses. But more importantly, the U.S. has had the lead since the invention of the Internet, and everybody around the world has benefited — and there's a strong sentiment among the world's Netheads that this continue.

Q: We bailed out the airlines, why not the telcos?

A: The airlines were not undergoing industry restructuring. They did that 20 years ago — People Express, etc., was a response to the advent of the jet plane. Remember Eastern? Pan Am? Dozens of others?

And the jet was just a 10x, or maybe, liberally, a 100x over the DC-3. Now we do 10x every couple of years.

As David S. Isenberg pointed out at the Fiber to the Home Council Annual Meeting last week in New Orleans, if dial-up Internet is a one-lane road, and DSL is a freeway (with 1 lane to work and 8 lanes home), then one fiber — a single fiber lit at today's speeds would be a road with 25 million lanes. That road would be 57,000 miles across. You could wrap it around the world width-wise 1 and a half times. That one fiber could carry the busy hour traffic of 1600 towns with 100,000 phones each. If everybody in the U.S. had a telephone, then two fibers could handle the conventional telephony busy-hour traffic. We could handle the entire world's telephony on 40 or 50 fibers (assuming everybody in the world had a telephone). And you can get such a fiber to your home — an entire fiber, to be lit as fast as necessary — for $3000.

Q: But if we let the telcos go bankrupt, will there be any telephone service? Won't the communications infrastructure collapse?

A: Of course there will be telephone service, and in fact you won't even notice a change.One of the best things about our economic system is that we have a very efficient mechanism to purge stranded capital without ruining the businesses themselves... it's called chapter 11. If an airline in Chapter 11 can still operate planes and get you safely from one airport to another, a telco operating in Chapter 11 can complete a telephone call. Just look at Worldcom. But of course, failing telcos will howl for government support, claiming that the sky is falling. We musn't give in to their pleas. Their businesses will emerge from chapter with a much lower capitalization and lower cost base, and will be able to charge lower prices.