It boggles the mind

I don't like to look up into the sky.

This has nothing to do with the fact that last summer two small planes collided mid-air five miles from my home, raining debris and death on a suburban neighborhood that had sprouted in a soybean field.

I don't like to look into the sky because I can't comprehend infinity. Like death, the federal deficit and dot-com stocks that survive despite results that make the former Soviet Union look solvent, looking at the sky makes me dizzy.

It's like open access. It seems fathomable until you look closely.

Cable companies claim - somewhat fairly - that they built the networks and developed the technology to run on them, so they should be allowed to do what they want. It's their playground, and if they want to limit access to the sliding board, that's their right.

That's for the courts and the politicians to decide. The real trick is the technology and whether those networks, as they are now, can ever be truly opened.

I've heard the arguments: It's easy. It's hard. It can be done, but it will take work. It can't be done, period.

No one truly knows. That's why AT&T Broadband and Time Warner Cable are running tests. Sure, they want a cozy nest for Excite@Home and Road Runner (and AOL), but they're pragmatic enough to realize that monopolies - while occasionally surging into the marketplace like carpenter ants chowing down on rotten wood - will not survive the government exterminators.

The dilemma is that cable networks have had to share and have finite bandwidth to host a potentially infinite number of ISPs and subscribers. On top of that, cable networks are typically not built to handle the strain. Operators, having stretched the limits of node contention tighter than a Jennifer Lopez gown, will wait until subscriber anguish turns to earsplitting squeals until they do something about network congestion.

Cable's programmers have had to share bandwidth for years. Ask any new programming network about getting onto a cable system, and you'll get a rant that would make Dennis Miller blush - and a lecture about the quality of those digital tiers that cable operators tout like circus barkers inviting chumps to see the freak show.

Why would anyone think that industry outsiders such as ISPs will have an easy road? Open access is like peeling an onion: The only guarantee is that at some layer of the process, someone will end up in the corner crying.

Next time you think the open access issue is something the courts and the federal government will solve, that cable operators are more evil than the White House Plumbers, that small ISPs have a guaranteed legal and moral right to broadband access, take a look up at the sky. That should give you some perspective.