Last week, the US Federal Communications Commission abandoned its decade-long experiment with forced access sharing. Under this process the four so-called "baby bell" phone companies were required to open their phone lines to competing broadband retailers, rather like Telstra's ADSL must be opened to its rivals.
As the former chief executive of US West, the baby bell that served the US Midwest, Sol Trujillo is intimately aware of the harmful effects that forced access policies have on telecommunications services. In the name of competition, access requirements also disingenuously known as unbundling make an entire industry subservient to regulators, rather than the market and consumers.
Telstra's last attempt to change prices for high-speed internet, involving the introduction of the entry level $30 per month price early last year, was subject to vigorous action by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and Telstra's retail rivals seeking to have the price increased.
This was punishing the customer to preserve the competitors and was just as odious as the policies that US regulators have unanimously decided are harmful to true telecommunications competition.
Telstra's decision last year to lower the cost of home broadband should have been welcomed around the country. Instead, a pricing arrangement which resulted in a massive surge in ADSL uptake was greeted with threats of a multimillion-dollar fine and a brutal series of condemnations in the press.
Telstra's basic broadband pricing has not changed in 1½ years, probably as the result of lessons learnt from last year's ugly fight. Such stagnant pricing in such a dynamic sector is not the sign of healthy competition.
The most harmful effect of forced access regulation is on infrastructure. The telecommunications market does not have the same stability as electricity or water; the steady progression of new communication technologies requires significant infrastructure investments to meet consumer demands.
It is clear that allowing competitors to leech off Telstra's copper wire network at a nominal rate that ensures their profitability, means that there are poor incentives to invest in newer, more advanced infrastructure.
To argue that the capital required to build such a network is so large that no company would possibly do so is fallacious. One need only look at the sudden explosion in aviation competition with the advent of Virgin Airlines to recognise this fact.
In telecommunications we can be confident that this will emerge in the US now that price shackling has been abandoned. Not only do the existing regulations dissuade young competitors from developing new services, but they give Telstra a significant disincentive to upgrade lines. This point was made clear in a Senate committee earlier this year in a discussion on comparable broadband speed.
Telstra's reluctance to roll out fibre optic cable to the home a technology which will rocket broadband speeds to among the best in the world is based not upon a lack of desire to do so, but a fear that the ACCC will force the company to open its lines at a rate which could make the roll-out a poor investment.
This is the regulatory environment Trujillo faced in the US, and this is the one he faces in Australia right now. However the recent developments here have not followed the positive developments in the America.
While recent Australian debate has focused on the National's rent-seeking demands for future-proofing, it is the operational separation of Telstra into a wholesale and retail division which threatens to be the legacy of the coalition's compromise.
If it goes through as planned, separation will lock in the regressive forced access regulation. Telstra Wholesale will be no more than a province of the ACCC empire controlled not by consumer demand but by an ACCC managed cartel of parasitic competitors trying to suck concessions from the one provider of significant communications capital that the country has.
The timing of the US decision is fortuitous for the federal government and those who will draw up the new arrangements for the final sale of Telstra.
We can look to the US, and their momentous decision to end this regulatory arrangement, for ideas on how to progress.
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