BT nationalisation footnote

Proposer
BenTrimble
State

Rejected

Vote Score

0

Age

3454 days


@BenTrimble edited manifesto/infrastructure.md - over 9 years ago

NIOs are intended to provide the basic infrastructure that is essentially to a functioning society in a way that is protected from the volatility of shareholder whims. They provide the basics for innovators to provide services on top of, and without simply placing the entire service burden onto the state through nationalisation.

[^1]: In the case of BT, the business would be broken up to separate the infrastructure (ducts, cabinets, poles, exchanges) from the commercial business and only the infrastructure side would become subject to the national infrastructure regulation

[^1]: In the case of BT, the existing company breakdown into various functions (in particular Openreach, BT Wholesale, BT Retail) should be examined to ensure that open access is provided to all BT owned infrastructure and that competition is fair and open. Particular attention should be paid to intra-BT Group trading and ease of entry into this market for small competitors.

[^2]: In a similar way to BT's telephone infrastructure, mobile operators would be required to transfer their ownership of masts into NIOs with the rest of their business remaining fully private

BenTrimble

@BenTrimble - over 9 years ago

Changes made to better reflect existing BT Group structure

Floppy

@Floppy - over 9 years ago

Can we identify the parts which would be "nationalised"? Presumably OpenReach, plus the core networks between exchanges.

Floppy

@Floppy - over 9 years ago

I only mention it as the change seems to me to lose that part.

BenTrimble

@BenTrimble - over 9 years ago

We should approach this issue by first understanding what benefit we want to bring to the end users before figuring out how to achieve that. What's the problem we're trying to solve? Lowering the bar of entry to new ISPs? Ensuring safety / reliability / stability? What's wrong with the existing Ofcom-based regulation?

To provide background, I work for BT so I have a lot of knowledge in this area.

philipjohn

@philipjohn - over 9 years ago

The aim here is to make sure that the infrastructure is taken out of BT's hands, basically. It's nationalisation but not because that infrastructure would be then put into a new non-profit organisation. In that respect, I'm less interested in what BT's current structure is because it's the physical infrastructure that we're taking out, regardless of which internal 'silo' BT has put it in...

Floppy

@Floppy - about 9 years ago

This has reached the time limit beyond which old suggestions are killed off. Feel free to resubmit or reopen if you want to continue the debate!