“Remember Verizon, and to Hell with Spain!”
I think this would have been a more appropriate title to Dan Frommer's latest article in Forbes. He slams Martin Varsavky's FON venture so hard that Varsavsky himself felt compelled to blog a response. Personally, I found this article hilarious from the first paragraph:
Give the folks at Spanish Wi-Fi startup FON credit for moxie: They've devised a business plan that takes advantage of the billions of dollars American broadband outfits have sunk into their networks. Too bad they don't seem to have checked with the broadband companies first.Am I being oversensitive or does this writing have a whiff of jingoist alarmism to it? Is it really relevant *at all* to mention any nationalities in this story?? I also thought this was funny because in 1898, the Spanish-American War was triggered after the US Battleship Maine mysteriously sunk in the harbor of Havana. Nobody really knows what happened to the Maine, but newspapers in the US jumped on the event to create public support for a war against Spain. A popular rallying slogan was: "Remember the Maine, and to Hell with Spain!" I'm not trying to defend FON by any means- in fact, I think the product, as conceived today, is almost a certain failure (notwithstanding the admirable marketing/networking abilities of Varsavsky). But for good journalism on why this is likely to be the case, I would direct readers to the critical but fair commentary of Mark Evans here and Glenn Fleishman here. For readers interested in a tale of evil Spanish freeriders trying to steal from hard-working, patriotic American phone companies, um, keep reading Forbes I guess. Anyway, to pay for the Spanish-American War, Congress imposed a general Excise Tax on telephone service...and even though the war lasted just 5 months, this tax is still being collected today more than 100 years later, and has raised more than $300 billion for the US government! So here's a Plan B for US telcos, as their futures look increasingly grim: convince Americans to have another war with Spain, which allows the goverment to raise more bogus telco taxes to pay for it, which would then ensure that government would always protect the telcos' well-being (don't want no competition touching our tax cash-cow, do we?).