Recent Headlines
October 2, 2009
Tweet Be Sure to Read Part One: Astroturf Overload — Broadband for America = One Giant Industry Front Group for an important introduction to what this super-sized industry front group is all about. Members of Broadband for America Red: A company or group actively engaging in anti-consumer lobbying, opposes Net Neutrality, supports Internet Overcharging, belongs […]
October 2, 2009
Tweet Astroturf: One of the underhanded tactics increasingly being used by telecom companies is “Astroturf lobbying” – creating front groups that try to mimic true grassroots, but that are all about corporate money, not citizen power. Astroturf lobbying is hardly a new approach. Senator Lloyd Bentsen is credited with coining the term in the 1980s […]
September 27, 2009
Tweet Hong Kong remains bullish on broadband. Despite the economic downturn, City Telecom continues to invest millions in constructing one of Hong Kong’s largest fiber optic broadband networks, providing fiber to the home connections to residents. City Telecom’s HK Broadband service relies on an all-fiber optic network, and has been dubbed “the Verizon FiOS of […]
September 23, 2009
Tweet BendBroadband, a small provider serving central Oregon, breathlessly announced the imminent launch of new higher speed broadband service for its customers after completing an upgrade to DOCSIS 3. Along with the launch announcement came a new logo of a sprinting dog the company attaches its new tagline to: “We’re the local dog. We better […]
September 23, 2009
Tweet Stop the Cap! reader Rick has been educating me about some of the new-found aggression by Shaw Communications, one of western Canada’s largest telecommunications companies, in expanding its business reach across Canada. Woe to those who get in the way. Novus Entertainment is already familiar with this story. As Stop the Cap! reported previously, […]
September 22, 2009
Tweet The Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission, the Canadian equivalent of the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, may be forced to consider American broadband policy before defining Net Neutrality and its role in Canadian broadband, according to an article published today in The Globe & Mail. [FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski's] proposal – to codify and enforce […]
September 21, 2009
Tweet In March 2000, two cable magnates sat down for the cable industry equivalent of My Dinner With Andre. Fine wine, beautiful table linens, an exquisite meal, and a Monopoly board with pieces swapped back and forth representing hundreds of thousands of Canadian consumers. Ted Rogers and Jim Shaw drew a line on the western […]
September 11, 2009
Tweet Just like FairPoint Communications, the Towering Inferno of phone companies haunting New England, Frontier Communications is making a whole lot of promises to state regulators and consumers, if they’ll only support the deal to transfer ownership of phone service from Verizon to them. This time, Frontier is issuing a self-serving press release touting their […]
September 7, 2009
Tweet I see it took all of five minutes for George Ou and his friends at Digital Society to be swayed by the tunnel vision myopia of last week’s latest effort to justify Internet Overcharging schemes. Until recently, I’ve always rationalized my distain for smaller usage caps by ignoring the fact that I’m being subsidized […]
September 1, 2009
Tweet In 2007, we took our first major trip away from western New York in 20 years and spent two weeks an hour away from Calgary, Alberta. After two weeks in Kananaskis Country, Banff, Calgary, and other spots all over southern Alberta, we came away with the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Good […]
August 31, 2009
Tweet A federal appeals court in Washington has struck down, for a second time, a rulemaking by the Federal Communications Commission to limit the size of the nation’s largest cable operators to 30% of the nation’s pay television marketplace, calling the rule “arbitrary and capricious.” The 30% rule, designed to keep no single company from […]
August 27, 2009
Tweet Less than half of Americans surveyed by PC Magazine report they are very satisfied with the broadband speed delivered by their Internet service provider. PC Magazine released a comprehensive study this month on speed, provider satisfaction, and consumer opinions about the state of broadband in their community. The publisher sampled more than 17,000 participants, […]
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Lemme get this straight: when you pay your monthly cable bill, the money is STILL yours, even though you have “consumed” the cable service for a month that you just paid for?
Is that what you mean by “your” money?
Your cable bill is $85. Let’s say $80 of that went to pay for the cable service and another five of your hard-earned bills didn’t actually pay for the “increased programming costs” and other excuses the industry hands you whenever your bill goes up. It went straight into a lobbyist’s checking account to dole out to bought and paid for elected officials.
The industry complains about the costs of doing business (which aren’t as horrific as they make you believe when you read their balance sheets) and then throw nearly $9 million down a rathole in DC. That nine million didn’t pay for USA, TNT, and ESPN. It effectively paid for the people you see every day on C-SPAN.
Phillip: I don’t know what you do when you’re not running this website, but let me assume you for the sake of argument that you are a business owner.
You sell a product or service of some kind. Once a buyer uses whatever product or service you sold them, they pay you for it. And once they pay you for it, what was “their” money now becomes YOURS, to do with as you see fit. They paid you for something; if they didn’t see the value in it or thought it was overpriced, they would not have agreed to the transaction in the first place.
So if you choose to spend some of your profit on lobbying, why should that be an issue for your customer?
The telecommunications marketplace is, by the design of intense lobbying, barely competitive. With services like broadband now becoming a utility service, consumers have every right to assert the slush funding of corporate lobbying campaigns with their subscriber dollars is unacceptable, especially when that money is used to lobby to keep the anti-competitive status quo.
Cable rates go up, lobbying spending goes up, consumer choice goes down.
When you need a product or service and do not have much of a choice for it, you can’t simply walk away because you think it is overpriced. Once a service becomes a practical necessity, either it must be sold unregulated on the free market with robust competition -or- reasonably regulated to check and balance the zeal to wring monopoly/duopoly profits. We effectively have neither. When these companies lobby against would-be competitors, the Money Party can run forever.
I’d also remind you I didn’t invent this line of reasoning. From the late 1980s forward, phone companies like AT&T and Verizon were using it against cable operators, and cable fired right back, demanding that captive telephone ratepayers should not have to fund the whims of the phone companies, including lobbying.
More than 100 years ago, we were dealing with almost exactly the same problem. Instead of telecom, it was railroads. Today it’s agencies like the FCC, beholden to pressure from Congress. Back then it was the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), beholden to pressure from Congress.
In both cases, lobbying cash (and more or less directed bribes) got the job done whenever pesky regulation threatened their respective fiefdoms. Lesson learned: the ICC/FCC is regulation by, for, and of the regulated.
One railroad executive said of the ICC at the time:
“The Commission…is or can be made, of great use to the railroads. It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of the railroads, at the same time that the supervision is almost entirely nominal…The part of wisdom is not to destroy the Commission, but to utilize it.”
That could easily have been said by Randall Stephenson at AT&T, who has Julius Genachowski on his speed dial. Or anyone at Comcast (including the always charming and delightful Meredith Atwell Baker, a former Commissioner from the FCC now enjoying Comcast’s fruits generated in part by her labor ((on their behalf.))
Consumers don’t want their money spent on lining the nest of politicians, who many presume to be on the take already.
But don’t worry… corporate influence extends into the heads of more than few justices on the Supreme Court who truly believe corporations are people, and limiting them from flushing endless buckets of cash would be restraint of their constitutionally-protected “free speech.”
So what is the solution?
As we managed to achieve in 1992 with pro-consumer reforms that promulgated the development of satellite-delivered television competition:
a new law and/or regulatory reform that guarantees access to broadband networks at fair wholesale rates by third party competitors who can market competitive service, policies that encourage and support new entrants into a lightly regulated marketplace, guarantees of unimpeded community-owned broadband development, rural broadband subsidies for development of rural Internet solutions including WISPs, rural fiber/DSL, etc., and a regulatory framework that defines broadband as a telecommunications service, giving regulators a clearly defined role in its development, oversight and operation when a player goes out of bounds.
The alternative, In the absence of sufficient competition, is a regulation framework that controls access and pricing to the same reasonable degree other utilities have operated under for more than 100 years.
If that fails, we should consider Australia’s approach which nationalized broadband under a publicly owned fiber-to-the-home network on which all players can operate and compete. Australia pulled it off with Telstra appealing to their greater sensibilities — namely piles of cash to buy them out. But that investment in the future will guarantee long term savings and a national broadband network that eliminates usage caps and will make us look like we’re still in the dial-up era in comparison.
Shareholders won’t care where the money comes from, as long as it is theirs to keep.
OK maybe I misunderstood the point of your original post.
You just posed a “solution” that addresses the lack of competition in the broadband last-mile market, but every one of those competitors could still spend a ton of their money on lobbying, which is the problem I THOUGHT we were talking about, and which was the topic of your original post.
Thanx