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three of the the bill's most important provisions essentially allow the Baby Bells to offer long distance services without first opening their local markets to competition (a key provision of the 1996 Telecommunications Reform Act), frees them of the legal obligation to lease parts of their fiber networks to competitors, and allows them to set prices for wholesale data services to rivals while exempting DSL from state utility commission oversight.
in other words, they can offer more complete phone and data packages than their competitors while legally pricing their broadband competition (like Covad or your local ISP) out of business. all this looks like the final nail in the coffin of competitive DSL, so expect to see the Baby Bells buying the hard-won (and expensive) assets of their broadband competitors for pennies on the dollar. (via SiliconValley.com)
