Tag: Communications

Cuck Fomcast

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There is a reason why Comcast is consistently one of the most despised businesses in the United States.

Case in point, the cable giant is refusing to upgrade lines for customers fho don’t shell out big bucks for cable TV in addition to internet service:

As we’ve often noted, Comcast has been shielded from the cord cutting trend somewhat thanks to its growing monopoly over broadband. As users on slow DSL lines flee telcos that are unwilling to upgrade their damn networks, they’re increasingly flocking to cable operators for faster speeds. When they get there, they often bundle TV services; not necessarily because they want it, but because it’s intentionally cheaper than buying broadband standalone.

And while Comcast’s broadband monopoly has protected it from TV cord cutting somewhat, the rise in streaming competition has slowly eroded that advantage, and Comcast is expected to see see double its usual rate of cord cutting this year according to Wall Street analysts.

Comcast being Comcast, the company has a semi-nefarious plan B. Part of that plan is to abuse its monopoly over broadband to deploy arbitrary and unnecessary usage caps and overage fees. These restrictions are glorified rate hikes applied to non competitive markets, with the added advantage of making streaming video more expensive. It’s a punishment for choosing to leave Comcast’s walled garden.

But Comcast appears to have discovered another handy trick that involves using its broadband monopoly to hamstring cord cutters. Reports emerged this week that the company is upgrading the speeds of customers in Houston and parts of the Pacific Northwest, but only if they continue to subscribe to traditional cable television. The company’s press release casually floats over the fact that only Comcast video customers will see these upgrades for now:

“Speed increases will vary based on the Xfinity Internet customers’ current speed subscriptions. Those receiving the speed boost will benefit from an increase of 30 to 40 percent in their download speeds. Existing Xfinity Internet and X1 video customers subscribing to certain packages can expect to experience enhanced speeds this month.”


As is usually the case, Comcast simply acted as if this was all just routine promotional experimentation (an argument that only works if you’re unfamiliar with Comcast’s other efforts to constrain emerging video competition):

Comcast is, using the immortal words of Douglas Adams, are, “A bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.”

Least Surprising News of the Day

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Elizabeth Pierce, who has been working for FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has been arrested for fraud.

Not a surprise, as deceit seems to be a central tenet of the Pai regime:

A broadband adviser selected by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai to run a federal advisory committee was arrested last week on claims she tricked investors into pouring money into a multimillion-dollar investment fraud scheme, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The adviser, Elizabeth Pierce, is the former chief executive of Quintillion, an Alaska-based fiber optic cable provider operating out of Anchorage. In her capacity as CEO, Pierce allegedly raised more than $250 million from two New York-based investment companies using forged contracts with other companies guaranteeing hundreds of millions of dollars in future revenue. Pierce resigned from Quintillion in August of last year, and she stepped down from her role in Pai’s Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee (BDAC) the following month.

As it turned out, those sales agreements were worthless because the customers had not signed them,” US attorney Geoffrey Berman said in prepared remarks, as reported by the WSJ. “Instead, as alleged, Pierce had forged counter-party signatures on contract after contract. As a result of Pierce’s deception, the investment companies were left with a system that is worth far less than Pierce had led them to believe.” Pierce was trying to raise money to help build out a fiber optic system that would wire Alaska with high-speed internet and better help connect it to networks in other US states. Pierce was charged with wire fraud last Thursday and faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

Seeing as how sucking up to corrupt telco executives is Ajit Pai’s mutant power, this should come as no suprise.

Cable Companies Suck

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And it appears that the worst of them is Centurylink.

In their latest escapade, the cable company is defending itself against highly credible accusations that it is charging customers for accounts and services that they never ordered, the cable company is claiming that it cannot be sued by its customers because it has no customers:

CenturyLink is trying to force customers into arbitration in order to avoid a class-action lawsuit from subscribers who say they’ve been charged for services they didn’t order. To do so, CenturyLink has come up with a surprising argument—the company says it doesn’t have any customers.

While the customers sued CenturyLink itself, the company says the customers weren’t actually customers of CenturyLink. Instead, CenturyLink says they were customers of 10 subsidiaries spread through the country.

CenturyLink basically doesn’t exist as a service provider—according to a brief CenturyLink filed Monday.

“That sole defendant, CenturyLink, Inc., is a parent holding company that has no customers, provides no services, and engaged in none of the acts or transactions about which Plaintiffs complain,” CenturyLink wrote. “There is no valid basis for Defendant to be a party in this Proceeding: Plaintiffs contracted with the Operating Companies to purchase, use, and pay for the services at issue, not with CenturyLink, Inc.”

CenturyLink says those operating companies should be able to intervene in the case and “enforce class-action waivers,” which would force the customers to pursue their claims via arbitration instead of in a class-action lawsuit. By suing CenturyLink instead of the subsidiaries, “it may be that Plaintiffs are hoping to avoid the arbitration and class-action waiver provisions,” CenturyLink wrote.

………

Customers from 14 US states are involved in the putative class action against CenturyLink in US District Court in Minnesota. Nine lawsuits filed last year were consolidated into one, and the consolidated complaint says:

[C]ustomers have routinely reported: (1) being promised one rate during the sales process but being charged a higher rate when actually billed; and (2) being charged unauthorized fees, including billing for services not ordered, for fake or duplicate accounts, for services ordered but never delivered, for services that were canceled, for equipment that was properly returned, and for early termination fees.

 When customers complained—and many thousands have—CenturyLink not only encouraged but rewarded its agents to deny remedying the wrongful charges and keep as much of the overcharges in the Company as possible.

Why I support municipal broadband, part MCXXVII.

Why Us Broadband Sucks, and How to Fix It

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The nickel version is stop throwing money the for profit companies, and actually build the infrastructure ourselves.

You can, do this in the same way that we established power and telephone service in rural areas in the past, which involved cross subsidies to support rural service and the establishment of rural co-ops to actually provide the service.

Noted telecommunications advocate Harold Feld (link above) goes in a different direction, he suggests that infrastructure be publicly provided, and suggests that this can be done through the expansion of unlicensed spectrum, which naturally creates a competitive marketplace:

The beauty of modern communications networks is that we can actually break up the supply chain and target subsidies to be much more specific. We can subsidize infrastructure instead of subsidizing carriers. The advantage of this is that by subsidizing infrastructure, we can subsidize infrastructure for many potential competitors (or at least more than one), rather than basically having a monopoly provider we either need to regulate up to the eyebrows to make sure we actually get decent, affordable service in exchange for the subsidy. Additionally, we have a lot of different ways to lower cost that actually lower cost. If we do that, we can actually see local businesses and local institutions willing and able to provide service for profits that, while perfectly reasonable for a local business, would be utterly uninteresting to even a small traditional carrier.

He then gives the example of WISPs (wireless ISPs) as to how this would generally function, but that the important bit is that the infrastructure has to be held commonly in some manner

WISPs aren’t the answer. WISPs are part of the answer. But, more importantly, WISPs provide a real life demonstration that we do not need to rely on the traditional “find a single carrier and pay the carrier” to bring broadband to rural America. If we focus on providing infrastructure, either indirectly by providing necessary inputs (like spectrum) or directly (for example, by building towers or backhaul fiber), we will see entities interested and eager to provide service in regions that traditional carriers do not find sufficiently profitable to be interesting.

Personally, pinko that I am, I would like to have publicly owned fiber to the curb, with ISPs doing the final connection to the home, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become increasingly enamored of public ownership of the means of production.

Kudos to Montana

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The Big Sky State has become the first red state to draft net neutrality regulations in response to the FCC repeal of net neutrality:

Montana will require Internet service providers to follow net neutrality principles in order to receive state government contracts.

Governor Steve Bullock, a Democrat, today signed an executive order imposing that requirement beginning July 1, 2018.

“There has been a lot of talk around the country about how to respond to the recent decision by Federal Communications Commission to repeal net neutrality rules, which keep the Internet free and open,” Bullock said. “It’s time to actually do something about it. This is a simple step states can take to preserve and protect net neutrality. We can’t wait for folks in Washington, DC, to come to their senses and reinstate these rules.”

Seriously, Montana?

I’m thinking that this issue may be an albatross around the neck of the Republicans.

Read Harold Feld

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He is a lawyer for the Public Knowledge, which advocates for, “Policies that serve the public interest.”

He lives and breaths this stuff, and he has looked at the merger between AT&T and Time Warner, and the rumored remedies that the US Department of Justice is demanding, and concludes that the remedies demanded by the government, including requiring a divestiture of CNN, have extensive precedent and are reasonable in the context of the industry:

I want to start by applauding Randal Stephenson for coming out quickly and denying the rumors that DoJ asked them to sell CNN as the price of getting the merger done. At the same time, however, he acknowledged that negotiations were “complicated,” and that he and recently confirmed Asst A.G. for Antitrust Makan Delrahim were still “getting to know each other” and “figure out the ask on the other side of the table.” He also made it clear that, if DoJ does challenge, AT&T is prepared to go to court and are confident they will win.

AT&T is generally pretty good at persuading everyone that DoJ doesn’t really have a case against them. As folks may recall, despite the fact that the proposed AT&T/T-Mo transaction violated just about every basic tenant of existing antitrust law, AT&T managed to convince everyone for the longest time that DoJ was just playing hardball with them and didn’t really mean it because DoJ didn’t really have a case. While Stephenson refused to discuss what was negotiated, the rumors suggest it was a demand to divest either DIRECTV or the Turner Broadcasting cable channels (which include CNN, as well as TNT, HBO and a bunch of other real popular programming.) Once again, you have antitrust experts who do not have any particular experience with cable mergers shaking their heads and predicting that DoJ has no case.

In fact, demanding divestiture of either the must have content or the DIRECTV distribution platform is precisely the remedy you would expect if you believe the deal presents significant harm because of the vertical integration issues. That’s been the position of my employer, Public Knowledge, which has opposed the transaction since AT&T announced the deal. (That predates Trump’s election, for those of you wondering.) If you want a more detailed understanding of the theory of the harms, you can find it in my boss Gene Kimmelman’s testimony to Congress here. While generally true that vertical deals are hard to challenge, the cable industry has long been something of an exception, and the remedy here is similar to what the FTC imposed on the AT&T/Turner deal in 1996, where the FTC imposed stock divestitures and restructuring to eliminate the voting interest of John Malone and Liberty Media because of Malone/Liberty’s ownership TCI, which was then the largest cable operator in the United States (25% national market share). Given the massive criticism of “behavioral” remedies and a call to return to “structural” remedies from the right and the left, it’s unsurprising that DoJ would want actual divestiture rather than go the Comcast/NBCU consent decree route.

I would add that consent decrees tend to have limited effect over the long run, and that Public Knowledge has opposed this merger since before Trump’s election.

While a lot of people have tried to cast opposition to the deal as political interference by Trump and his Evil Minions™, it is clear that opposition could be easily justified.

This might be another case of a stopped clock being right twice a day, or it might be a vendetta by Donald Trump. 

Just don’t jump to conclusions yet.

Read the rest.

Why We Hate Them

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Comcast has sued the state of Vermont to try to avoid a requirement to build 550 miles of new cable lines.

Comcast’s lawsuit against the Vermont Public Utility Commission (VPUC) was filed Monday in US District Court in Vermont and challenges several provisions in the cable company’s new 11-year permit to offer services in the state. One of the conditions in the permit says that “Comcast shall construct no less than 550 miles of line extensions into un-cabled areas during the [11-year] term.”

Comcast would rather not do that. The company’s court complaint says that Vermont is exceeding its authority under the federal Cable Act while also violating state law and Comcast’s constitutional rights:

The VPUC claimed that it could impose the blanket 550-mile line extension mandate on Comcast because it is the “largest” cable operator in Vermont and can afford it. These discriminatory conditions contravene federal and state law, amount to undue speaker-based burdens on Comcast’s protected speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution… and deprive Comcast and its subscribers of the benefits of Vermont law enjoyed by other cable operators and their subscribers without a just and rational basis, in violation of the Common Benefits Clause of the Vermont Constitution.

Rival providers Charter and Burlington Telecom don’t have to comply with these special requirements, Comcast said. Instead, the other companies “need only comply with the non-discriminatory line extension policies” established in a VPUC rule.

Comcast’s complaint also objected to several other requirements in the permit, including “unreasonable demands” for upgrades to local public, educational, and governmental (PEG) access channels and the building of “institutional networks (“I-Nets”) to local governmental and educational entities upon request and on non-market based terms.”

………

Comcast often refuses to extend its network to customers outside its existing service area unless the customers pay for Comcast’s construction costs, which can be tens of thousands of dollars.

Comcast is regularly at the top of the list on the most loathed company in America, but somehow or other, they continue to flourish.

There is some sort of profound market failure going on.

Yeah, Throw This Guy Some Coin

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Someone got sick and tired of the Indian phone banks that are making thousands of calls in an attempt to scam us, and someone calling himself “Project Mayhem” has written software to call the phone banks hundreds of times a minute to prevent them from reaching real people:

It’s likely you’ve gotten calls from criminals who pose as IRS employees and threaten to imprison you if you don’t pay them thousands of dollars. These crooks work in teams based in Indian call centers. They are scumbags of the lowest order, preying on seniors and immigrants through fear and intimidation. Here’s a security developer who decided to fight back. He wrote a script that called one of these IRS scammers’ phone banks 28 times a second, flooding their phone lines and making it impossible for them to ply their vile trade. It’s fun to listen to the scammers curse at the programmer’s recorded message. According to Twisted Sifter, he has launched something called Project Mayhem to continue his fight against these unscrupulous scammers.” He is seeking Patreon donations to go after IRS scammers, tech support scammers, loan scammers, “you have won” scammers, and “family member in trouble” scammers. ………

You can donate money to this anonymous hero via Patreon.

Unfortunately, he has not released the code, though a number of sources have said that it is a rather trivial programming operation.

Personally, I’ll just lobby my Congresscritter to put a penny a minute tax on all overseas calls in both directions.

For ordinary people the costs are minimal, but for the scammers, it would make their business model, such as it is, untenable.

As to those who would argue that this would cripple the technical support and customer service operations currently operated in India, I will simply quote Randall Munroe, and say:

My experience with Indian technical support and customer service has been less than salutary.

This is the Magic of the Marketplace that New FCC Chair Ajit Pai So Loves

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the map is pretty staggering. pink is poor areas, green is areas where AT&T provides decent internet. almost no overlap. pic.twitter.com/ay9Jw7KR0J

— libby watson (@libbycwatson) March 10, 2017

The Wonders of the Market

There is a (soon to be canceled by the Trump administration, no doubt) federal program that requires that low cost internet be provided to poor people where broadband is available.

AT&T’s way of dealing with this was to scrupulously ensure that there was no broadband available to the poor so that they could over charge them:

It’s no secret that ISPs can make more money from network upgrades in wealthy neighborhoods than low-income ones, and a new analysis of Cleveland, Ohio, by broadband advocacy groups appears to show that AT&T is following that strategy. The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) and a Cleveland-based group called Connect Your Community alleged in their report today that “AT&T has systematically discriminated against lower-income Cleveland neighborhoods in its deployment of home Internet and video technologies over the past decade.”

Last year, the NDIA brought attention to AT&T’s refusal to provide $5-per-month Internet service to poor people in areas where the company hasn’t upgraded its network. When the Federal Communications Commission approved AT&T’s purchase of DirecTV in 2015, the FCC required AT&T to provide discount broadband to poor people as condition of the merger. But the condition apparently allowed AT&T to charge full price in areas where maximum download speeds were less than 3Mbps. After the NDIA spoke out, AT&T announced it would stop exploiting the loophole and instead provide discount Internet to poor people in all parts of its network.

Today’s followup report from the NDIA and Connect Your Community analyzes FCC data on AT&T Internet deployments in Cleveland, where many residents were initially declared ineligible for the discount broadband service.

“Specifically, AT&T has chosen not to extend its ‘fiber-to-the-node’ VDSL infrastructure—which is now the standard for most Cuyahoga County suburbs and other urban AT&T markets throughout the US—to the majority of Cleveland Census blocks, including the overwhelming majority of blocks with individual poverty rates above 35 percent,” the report said.

………

AT&T DSL speeds are often extremely slow when service is delivered entirely over copper telephone wires from central offices that can be nearly three miles from individual homes. Data speeds degrade with distance over copper, so AT&T boosts speeds in many areas by bringing fiber deeper into each neighborhood with its fiber-to-the-node (FTTN) technology. AT&T’s fastest speeds of all involve bringing fiber all the way to each home.

“AT&T apparently chose not to install fiber-to-the-node infrastructure anywhere in the areas served by its four Cleveland central offices with the greatest concentration of high-poverty neighborhoods,” the advocacy groups wrote. “The absence of FTTN in these lower-income neighborhoods, and the overall disparity in FTTN deployment between Cleveland and the suburbs, can be traced largely to AT&T’s failure to deploy FTTN anywhere in the service areas of four ‘central offices’… with large lower-income customer bases: those at 6513 Guthrie, 5400 Prospect, 2130 East 107th, and 12223 St. Clair.”

By contrast, “Most of Cuyahoga County’s suburban communities are fully covered” by faster AT&T network technologies, including fiber-to-the-home, the report said.

………

The NDIA shared its findings with Federal Communications Commission member Mignon Clyburn, a Democrat, but it isn’t expecting any action from the FCC’s Republican leadership.

“The current chair of the FCC [Ajit Pai] is not likely to be interested,” Siefer told Ars. “We have shared this research with Commissioner Clyburn’s office. We do not see a path in the current climate (federally and in Ohio) to force AT&T to make the upgrades. We do see this research as proof that further deregulation is not going to reduce the digital divide. Our solutions will likely include local, state, and federal policies that encourage equitable build-out. We also need competition to bring down residential broadband costs. If AT&T is not going to serve low-income areas then we need policies and initiatives that actively recruit other broadband providers.”

Pai’s theory is that if you allow poorly regulated monopolists to gouge and charge monopoly rents, then they will invest in better service.

Reality indicates that all that if you allow poorly regulated monopolists to gouge and charge monopoly rents, they will invest in ensuring that they can maintain those monopoly rents, to the exclusion of customer service and innovation.

AT&T spent its money in Ohio on banning municipal broadband, instead of getting poor people decent internet service.

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It is Called Selling Out

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A number of the more prominent civil rights organizations in the United States have been bought off by the Telcos, and are opposing net neutrality:

Leading civil rights groups who for many years have been heavily bankrolled by the telecom industry are signaling their support for Donald Trump’s promised rollback of the Obama administration’s net neutrality rules, which prevent internet service providers from prioritizing some content providers over others.

The Obama administration’s Federal Communications Commission established net neutrality by reclassifying high-speed internet as a regulated phone-like telecommunications service, as opposed to a mostly unregulated information service. The re-classification was cheered by advocates for a free and open internet.

But now Trump’s new FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, a former Verizon attorney, is pushing to repeal the net neutrality reform by rolling back that re-classification — and he’s getting help not only from a legion of telecom lobbyists, but from civil rights groups.

In a little-noticed joint letter released last week, the NAACP, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, OCA (formerly known as the Organization for Chinese Americans), the National Urban League, and other civil rights organizations sharply criticized the “jurisdictional and classification problems that plagued the last FCC” — a reference to the legal mechanism used by the Obama administration to accomplish net neutrality.

………

None of the civil rights groups that signed the joint letter responded to a request for comment.

It’s not the first time civil rights group have engaged in lobbying debates seemingly unrelated to their core missions, but in favor of their corporate donors. At a time when OCA received major funding from Southwest Airlines, the group filed a regulatory letter on behalf of the airline in support of Southwest’s bid to open flights at Houston airport. The NAACP, after receiving financial backing from Wal-Mart, helped the retail chain during its contentious bid to open stores in New York City.

………

The civil rights group opposed to net neutrality have employed several arguments against the proposal. In one filing made in 2010, the NAACP signed onto an argument from MMTC that net neutrality reforms were a waste of resources because the FCC should focus on “more pressing racial discrimination and exclusionary hiring and promotion practices of certain Silicon Valley high-tech companies.” In a separate filing in 2014, MMTC and the NAACP argued that reclassification would threaten the “fragile state of minority engagement in the digital ecosystem.”

While advocating against net neutrality, the organizations on the joint letter have raked in money from the telecom industry.

If any of these organizations make a fundraising pitch to you, you should find another recipient.

It appears that these groups have already gotten well remunerated for their services to corporate America.

These are Dishonest People Who Knowingly Break the Law

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When talking about Bernie Madoff Eric Falkenstein made the following observation:

People who meticulously avoid email should not be trusted, because it is simply too calculating, as if they know they are regularly committing crimes. A phone conversation can always be disavowed, you just say you were talking about last weekend’s bar mitzvah.

Now we see what appears to be a rather anodyne article about how many of the movers and shakers on Wall Street meticulously avoid email as well:

In an age when most bankers use keyboards to communicate with each other, a small group of the Wall Street elite refuses to say anything substantive in an email, text or chat, and some will not communicate digitally at all.

 This group, which includes top bankers like JPMorgan Chase & Co Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon and powerful investors like Carl Icahn and Berkshire Hathaway Inc’s Warren Buffett, were eschewing electronic communications long before the probe of U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails and the recent hacks of her campaign manager’s account made headlines.

 Some on Wall Street are nostalgic for a time when in-person conversations or phone calls were the norm, but others believe the words they type and send can come back to haunt them. Prosecutors have built insider trading, mortgage fraud and rate-rigging cases on embarrassing emails over the past several years, and they are often the most memorable part.

You really do not want to trust these guys with your money.

Yet Another Reason to Oppose the AT&T/Time Warner Merger

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It turns out that AT&T has created a warrant free smorgasbord privacy invasions while charging the taxpayer through the nose:

………

Hemisphere is a secretive program run by AT&T that searches trillions of call records and analyzes cellular data to determine where a target is located, with whom he speaks, and potentially why.

“Merritt was in a position to access the cellular telephone tower northeast of the McStay family gravesite on February 6th, 2010, two days after the family disappeared,” an affidavit for his girlfriend’s call records reports Hemisphere finding (PDF). Merritt was arrested almost a year to the date after the McStay family’s remains were discovered, and is awaiting trial for the murders.

In 2013, Hemisphere was revealed by The New York Times and described only within a Powerpoint presentation made by the Drug Enforcement Administration. The Times described it as a “partnership” between AT&T and the U.S. government; the Justice Department said it was an essential, and prudently deployed, counter-narcotics tool.

However, AT&T’s own documentation—reported here by The Daily Beast for the first time—shows Hemisphere was used far beyond the war on drugs to include everything from investigations of homicide to Medicaid fraud.

Hemisphere isn’t a “partnership” but rather a product AT&T developed, marketed, and sold at a cost of millions of dollars per year to taxpayers. No warrant is required to make use of the company’s massive trove of data, according to AT&T documents, only a promise from law enforcement to not disclose Hemisphere if an investigation using it becomes public.

………

While telecommunications companies are legally obligated to hand over records, AT&T appears to have gone much further to make the enterprise profitable, according to ACLU technology policy analyst Christopher Soghoian.

“Companies have to give this data to law enforcement upon request, if they have it. AT&T doesn’t have to data-mine its database to help police come up with new numbers to investigate,” Soghoian said.

AT&T has a unique power to extract information from its metadata because it retains so much of it. The company owns more than three-quarters of U.S. landline switches, and the second largest share of the nation’s wireless infrastructure and cellphone towers, behind Verizon. AT&T retains its cell tower data going back to July 2008, longer than other providers. Verizon holds records for a year and Sprint for 18 months, according to a 2011 retention schedule obtained by The Daily Beast.

The disclosure of Hemisphere was not the first time AT&T has been caught working with law enforcement above and beyond what the law requires.

………

Once AT&T provides a lead through Hemisphere, then investigators use routine police work, like getting a court order for a wiretap or following a suspect around, to provide the same evidence for the purpose of prosecution. This is known as “parallel construction.”

“This document here is striking,” Schwartz told The Daily Beast. “I’ve seen documents produced by the government regarding Hemisphere, but this is the first time I’ve seen an AT&T document which requires parallel construction in a service to government. It’s very troubling and not the way law enforcement should work in this country.”

………

Sheriff and police departments pay from $100,000 to upward of $1 million a year or more for Hemisphere access. Harris County, Texas, home to Houston, made its inaugural payment to AT&T of $77,924 in 2007, according to a contract reviewed by The Daily Beast. Four years later, the county’s Hemisphere bill had increased more than tenfold to $940,000.

AT&T is profiteer in support of the modern surveillance state. 

Increasing the data that they can collect through mergers and acquisitions is not good for the rest of us.

Their Customer Service Will Make Comcast Look Like Tesla

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AT&T is looking to by Time Warner cable:

AT&T Inc. is close to an agreement to acquire Time Warner Inc. for about $86 billion, people with knowledge of the matter said, a deal that would create a media behemoth that offers TV, wireless, and the content that goes with it.

 The bid values Time Warner at about $110 a share — 23 percent more than where the stock closed Friday — and is structured as an even split between cash and equity, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. If accepted, it would cement the biggest acquisition of the year, surpassing Bayer AG’s $66 billion takeover of U.S. seed giant Monsanto Co., announced in May.

Buying Time Warner would give AT&T premium entertainment programming including HBO and the Cartoon Network, which it could offer its millions of pay-TV, mobile phone and Internet subscribers. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson has been trying to transform the Dallas-based phone company into a media and entertainment giant, and now has one of Hollywood’s top film and TV producers in his cross-hairs.

What do you get when you juxtapose the customer service cultures of the artist formerly known as Ma Bell with what was formerly the 2nd worst cable company in America?

I think that it would be fair to call this merged company the Donald Trump of communications.

Nashville Does the Right Thing, of Course, AT&T Will Sue to Stop This

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After months of obstruction and delay by the incumbent providers, the Nashville City Council has voted to Google Fiber authorization to mount the the lines on the poles themselves.

Needless to say AT&T will not stand for such consumer friendly behavior:

The Nashville Metro Council last night gave its final approval to an ordinance designed to help Google Fiber accelerate deployment of high-speed Internet in the Tennessee city, despite AT&T and Comcast lobbying against the measure. Google Fiber’s path isn’t clear, however, as AT&T said weeks ago that it would likely sue Nashville if it passes the ordinance. AT&T has already sued Louisville, Kentucky over a similar ordinance designed to help Google Fiber.

The Nashville Council vote approved a “One Touch Make Ready” ordinance that gives Google Fiber or other ISPs quicker access to utility poles. The ordinance lets a single company make all of the necessary wire adjustments on utility poles itself, instead of having to wait for incumbent providers like AT&T and Comcast to send work crews to move their own wires.

One Council member who opposed the ordinance asked AT&T and Comcast to put forth an alternative plan, but the council stuck with the original One Touch Make Ready proposal.

AT&T and Comcast were using their positions on the top of the poles to delay Google deployment, a rather unsurprising state of affairs given that their business model is predicated on extracting monopoly rents.

The existing model is not a free market, but incumbent monopolies, which is why US internet is so expensive and so slow.

About F%$#ing Time

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8 years ago, New York granted Verizon a franchise to deliver broadband on the condition that they offer FIOS service to every household in the 5 boroughs.

Needless to say, Verizon has not done this, instead moving only into the most lucrative neighborhoods.

Finally, New York City has issued a notice of default:

New York City officials yesterday notified Verizon that the company is in default of an agreement to bring fiber connections to all households in the city and could file a lawsuit against the company.

The road to a potential lawsuit has been a long one. In June 2015, New York released an audit that found Verizon failed to meet a commitment to extend FiOS to every household in the five boroughs by June 2014. City officials and Verizon have been trying to resolve the matter since then with no success, as Verizon says that it hasn’t actually broken the agreement.

The default letter (full text) sent yesterday by the city Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications (DoITT) says Verizon has failed to pass all residential buildings in the city with fiber. As of October 2015, there were at least 38,551 addresses where Verizon hadn’t fulfilled installation service requests that were more than a year old, the letter said.

“Moreover, Verizon improperly reduced, from $50 million to $15 million, the performance bond required [by] the Agreement on the basis of Verizon’s incorrect representations that Verizon had met the prescribed deployment schedule, when in fact it had not,” the letter said. City officials demanded that Verizon restore the bond and wants a response within 30 days. The default letter also accuses Verizon of failing to make records related to its provision of cable service available to the city during its audit.

“Officials say they could sue Verizon unless the carrier shows clear plans for stepping up installations,” and that the notice is the first step in that process, The Wall Street Journal reported. The citywide fiber agreement lets NYC seek monetary damages from Verizon if it fails to deliver on the fiber promises.

………

Verizon made its citywide FiOS commitment in 2008 in exchange for a cable television franchise. Technically, Verizon is only obligated to provide TV service, but Verizon provides Internet and phone access over the same wires.

Verizon claims it has met the requirement to pass all households with fiber, but Verizon and the city disagree over the definition of “pass.” Verizon says its fiber doesn’t actually have to be in front of a building in order to “pass” it, as long as it’s close enough to buildings that Verizon can provision service without delay. The city’s default letter says Verizon hasn’t met the agreement since “it has not run fiber immediately in front of or behind each residential building in the City.”

Verizon has blamed landlords for not providing access to buildings. But the city’s audit report found evidence that Verizon demanded exclusive agreements from landlords that would shut out other providers, in violation of the franchise agreement.

The phone and cable companies are natural monopolies, and their business models are predicated on this.

It’s why marked based solutions simply do not work.

We’re the Phone Company. We Don’t Care; We Don’t Have To.

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After being called out by the press, AT&T, which cut a deal for low internet costs for the poor as a part of its merger with DirectTV, and then specifically avoided upgrading the speed of their networks to avoid offering them discounted service has relented in the face of lots of bad press:

AT&T will stop exploiting a loophole that it used to deny a discounted home Internet service to poor people in areas where it hasn’t upgraded its network.

 AT&T’s purchase of DirecTV came with a Federal Communications Commission requirement to offer Internet service for either $5 or $10 a month to households in the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). But AT&T was able to avoid making this discount price available to low-income people in areas where its network doesn’t support download speeds of at least 3Mbps.

A broadband advocacy group called the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) asked AT&T to reconsider recently, and AT&T denied the request. But AT&T changed its mind after the NDIA wrote a blog post that was widely shared by news media and fueled criticism of the carrier.

Incumbent carriers can be trusted to the the right thing when they have exhausted every other possibility, I guess.

This is a classic example of a market failure which is not supposed to occur according the the free market mousketeers, but it makes perfect sense:  If you can make more money off of poor service, then you will make more money off of poor service.