On Monday, Stop the Cap! joined 21 other public interest organizations in sending a joint letter urging the Federal Communications Commission to deny Charter’s bid to take over Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. Late last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler may be planning to circulate a draft order approving the $90 billion merger.

The Center for Media Justice, CREDO Action, Daily Kos, Demand Progress, Free Press and Presente.org were among the media justice, Internet rights and public interest groups calling on the FCC to reject this deal, which would create a national broadband duopoly.

Together, Charter and Comcast would control nearly two-thirds of the nation’s high-speed broadband subscribers and would offer service to nearly 80 percent of U.S. households. The letter notes that this substantial increase in market power, coupled with Charter’s $66 billion in debt, would give the company both the incentive and the heightened ability to raise prices at will. This would broaden the digital divide, hitting low-income communities the hardest.

Stop the Cap! earlier filed objections to the merger with the FCC and in two states seen as critical to the deal – New York and California. In our view, no cable merger has ever resulted in better service or lower prices for consumers. Such deals deliver handsome sums to executives and shareholders while saddling customers with relentless rate hikes and no improvement in service. Charter’s history is troubling and its ability to meet its financial obligations while saddled in debt is dubious. Charter declared bankruptcy in 2009, after accumulating $21.7 billion in debt accumulated from years of mergers and consolidation efforts. As credit markets tightened up, Charter’s ability to manage its debt fell apart. Now the company is back to its old modus operandi, piling up debt buying Time Warner Cable — a much larger operation, and trying to combine it with Bright House Networks, another cable operator prominent in Florida.

Earlier this year, several of the signers delivered petitions to the FCC from more than 300,000 Americans opposing the merger, and thousands have called the agency in recent days to weigh in against the deal. Political leaders including Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid have spoken out about the merger’s many harms.

“Too many Washington insiders have given up on challenging this deal despite its serious harms,” said Free Press policy director Matt Wood. “Instead of forecasting its chances for approval, the groups signing this letter will keep fighting to block this merger, along with the guaranteed price increases it would foist on people and communities who can least afford it.

“If Charter gets this merger approved, nothing will stop it from raising its rates for high-speed broadband and video customers who have nowhere else to turn. Temporary promises and weak conditions aren’t going to preserve competition and choice in the long run, and they’re not going to do anything to stop these price hikes. The FCC is charged with promoting the public interest, and there’s no way in which this merger benefits the public. Higher prices and fewer choices won’t help anyone but the companies pitching this bad bargain.”

“If its takeover of Time Warner Cable goes through, Charter will have a broadband footprint as big as Comcast’s,” said Demand Progress executive director David Segal. “This would turn an industry that’s already too concentrated into a duopoly, paving the way for higher rates today and the eventual formation of a new cross-sector behemoth that controls content production and delivery.

“Americans increasingly understand that corporate concentration is jacking up prices and lowering quality for all sorts of basic goods and services. At a hearing of a Senate antitrust subcommittee this month, lawmakers made it clear that they see companies that are allegedly too big to fix in many industries, not just the banking sector. This FCC must now decide whether it wants to stem the swelling tide of concentration, or enable these monopolies.”

Free Press and Stop the Cap! contributed elements of this story.

Fixed (wired) broadband is now the most important revenue component of the TV-Internet-Phone package.

Despite ordering 41 percent more downstream network equipment in 2015 than the year before, cable operators enjoyed a 3% drop in broadband equipment expenses, according to researcher SNL Kagan.

While your cable operator blames the cost of upgrades and usage growth for your latest broadband rate hike, cable company spending on broadband actually declined thanks to lower prices and more efficient broadband networks.

ARRIS, a major supplier of cable broadband equipment, also saw its revenue from equipment sales decline as cable operators used software virtualization to cut the price of DOCSIS channels over new, more efficient converged cable access platforms.

Cable operators are feeling heat in some markets from emerging fiber-based competitors, but the imminent arrival of DOCSIS 3.1 has made meeting those competitive challenges easy and less costly than ever before.

ARRIS closed out the year as the global revenue leader in broadband equipment, grabbing 53% of total revenue among providers of cable broadband infrastructure. ARRIS benefitted immensely from the focus of its primary North American customers, including Comcast and Time Warner Cable, on dramatically increasing throughput to stay competitive with Verizon FiOS, AT&T U-verse, and Google Fiber.

“The imminent availability of DOCSIS 3.1 linecards and full-spectrum channels won’t slow the continued purchase and deployment of current DOCSIS 3.0 channels as cable operators must continue to increase throughput to reduce the likelihood of churn among their broadband subscribers,” said Jeff Heynen, senior research analyst for SNL Kagan.

But the costs to deliver those service improvements are now so low, providers are enjoying actual declines in their annual expenses for equipment upgrades, while at the same time many are raising prices and introducing or increasing modem rental fees and usage caps.

If you are willing to spend $20 a month for a porn video free big tits cam service created for mobile devices, T-Mobile will let you watch forever without counting against your monthly data cap.

The latest “zero rating” (exempting some ‘preferred’ content from data caps) controversy from John Legere’s T-Mobile means if you watch educational programming from PBS on your mobile device, it will take a bite out of your usage allowance. But you can nibble all you like on MiKandi, the latest addition to the Binge On program.

MiKandi, which claims to offer “DVD quality” adult entertainment, calls it a victory for freedom of speech:

“When mainstream tech companies announce new platforms it tends to be another way to censor your online experience,” MiKandi CEO Jesse Adams said in a company blog post. “T-Mobile is treating adults like adults and we hope that other tech companies follow in their footsteps.”

T-Mobile hasn’t exactly trumpeted their new association with a porn video supplier, quietly adding the site to its growing list of data cap free websites. But now that it is there, can Pornhub be far behind?

Fraudsters impersonating your Internet Service Provider are sending urgent malware warnings that urge you to call straight away to “resolve” malicious spyware on your computer. If you follow through on that request, they will maliciously resolve to remove money from your bank account. If you’re already too late, then fret not because you can still resort to services such as financial fraud recovery.

“Malvertising” has become a multi-million dollar industry, and nothing is more profitable than claiming to remove malware from your personal computer that isn’t there in the first place. A review of your spam folder or voicemail messages may show a number of messages and calls claiming to come from Microsoft or your Internet Service Provider informing you they have supposedly discovered illegitimate software running on your computer that needs to be removed urgently.

These schemes have become very sophisticated, with warning warnings appearing in your web browser (as an embedded, pop-up or pop-under message) that identifies your general location and ISP as part of the malware alert. To enhance credibility, these messages include your ISPs logo and a professional-sounding audio message that warns your credit cards, passwords, and personal information are at risk.

Malwarebytes Labs, a legitimate fighter of all-things-malware, recently investigated these warning messages and dialed the toll-free number to see what would happen next.

[Our call was] handled by a tech support company out of India that goes by the name of Credence Incorporation and operates a website at: support-samurai.com.

As always, the technician that took remote control of our machine found many “infected files”, using outrageous (for anyone tech savvy) tricks:

Many people won’t know the difference, but the above command is by no means a way to scan a system for malware. Sadly, this sales pitch will still prove effective and those crooks will be able to extort several hundred dollars for non-existent computer problems.

At the time of writing this blog, we noticed that all the fraudulent websites had been shutdown. They had been registered under disguise with the following identity:

Registrant Name: Elizabeth Gonzalez
Registrant Organization: Sky-IP
Registrant Street: Addison House Plaza, street 57
Registrant City: Panama

The scam relies on your IP address to show your ISP and general geographic location. After calling, they’ll take your credit card number and bill up to several hundred dollars deleting non-existent malware while getting your permission to take remote control of your computer. Non-tech savvy users will probably never suspect a thing.

In addition to using a legitimate anti-virus program, it doesn’t hurt to have a second malware detector working for you. We found a promotion today for Malwarebytes Premium (1 year subscription for up to three computers), through Newegg.com for $12.00 (free shipping) using promo code: EMCEHGF27 

(Stop the Cap! does not receive any commission or any other benefits from Malwarebytes or Newegg. It was simply the cheapest price we could find for the software and is subject to expire after today.)

Entrenched telecom industry lobbyists and a legislature enriched by their campaign contributions chose the interests of AT&T, Comcast, and Charter Communications over the broadband needs of rural Tennessee, killing a municipal broadband expansion bill already scaled down to little more than a demonstration project.

The Tennessee House Business and Utilities Subcommittee voted 5-3 Tuesday to end efforts to bring much-needed Internet access to rural Hamilton and Bradley counties, long ignored or underserved by the state’s dominant telecom companies. Rep. Kevin Brooks’ (R-Cleveland) original bill would have allowed Chattanooga-based EPB and other publicly owned utility services to expand fiber broadband and television service to other electric co-ops around the state.

Realizing his bill would be voted up or down by members of a committee that included one former AT&T executive and others receiving substantial campaign contributions from some of Tennessee’s largest phone and cable companies, he reduced the scale of his own bill to a simple demonstration project serving a limited number of customers.

The bill failed anyway, in a vote that took less than a minute.

The Chattanooga Times Free Press described the scene:

Rep. Marc Gravitt (R-East Ridge) voted for Brooks’ amendment and Rep. Patsy Hazlewood (R-Signal Mountain), a one-time AT&T executive, voting against it.

As Rep. Kent Calfee (R-Kingston), the subcommittee’s chairman, prepared to move on to the next bill, he suddenly realized the original bill remained before the panel.

“I’m sorry,” Calfee, who voted against the amendment, told Brooks as the Cleveland lawmaker turned to leave. “It’s the amendment [that failed]. Is there any need to vote on the bill?”

Brooks replied, “The amendment makes the bill. I’d love a vote on the bill.”

“Sorry about that,” Calfee said.

And that was that.

Residents and business people alike in northern Hamilton and portions of Bradley counties say they either have no service, lousy service or wireless service that makes it very expensive to upload and download documents for work and school.

EPB provides municipal power, broadband, television, and telephone service for residents in Chattanooga, Tenn.

“It’s a testament to the power of lobbying against this bill and not listening to our electorate,” Brooks told reporters. “The voice of the people today was not heard. And that’s unfortunate.”

Brooks’ bill did attract considerable interest – from telecom industry lobbyists who flooded the state legislative offices with a mission of killing it. The Tennessee newspaper said a “platoon of lobbyists and executives, including AT&T Tennessee President Joelle Phillips,” poured into the House hearing room or watched on nearby video screens to scrutinize the vote.

“I heard they hired 27 lawyers to fight,” Brooks said.

Rural Tennessee Republicans were disappointed by the outcome, which leaves substantial parts of their districts unwired for broadband.

“[This] was the perfect opportunity for EPB to be a pilot and to prove they can do what they say they can do,” said Rep. Dan Howell (R-Georgetown). “And if they can’t do it, it’s a perfect opportunity to put it to rest forever. They wouldn’t even let us do a pilot to prove that EPB can do what it claimed.”

Brooks

Rep. Mike Carter (R-Ooltewah), also has a bill being held up in the legislature that would allow expansion of public broadband with the consent of citizen members of co-ops and elected leaders of the rural utilities.

Carter didn’t seem too surprised municipal broadband bills like his were being delayed or killed in the state legislature at the behest of AT&T and other companies.

“You just don’t go up against Goliath unless you have your sling and five stones. I just didn’t have my five stones today,” Carter said.

AT&T declared the bill was flawed, arguing in a statement it was not opposed to municipal broadband, so long as it was targeted only to customers unserved by any other provider. AT&T complained Brooks’ bill lacked language protecting them from unwanted competition.

“None of the bills considered … has any provision that would limit government expansion to unserved areas or even focus on those areas,” AT&T wrote.

Less than 24 hours after the vote ended Charter Communications had a special message for members of the legislature.

The cable operator sent invitations to Tennessee lawmakers giving them free airtime to star in their own “public service announcements” that will blanket the screens of Charter cable TV customers, giving the politicians free exposure.

Rep. Calfee’s second largest contributor is AT&T.

Charter’s director of government affairs for Tennessee was the executive extending the invitation.

“As a leading broadband communications provider and cable operator serving customers in Tennessee, Charter is committed to providing compelling public affairs programming and public service announcements,” said Nick Pavlis, Charter’s chief lobbyist in the state and a Knoxville city councilman. “We hope you will take advantage of this opportunity to speak directly to your constituents. Taping times are available on a first-come, first-served basis, so we encourage you to schedule yours as soon as possible.”

“Right now it would appear to those watching from the outside that big business won and big business is now reciprocating,” said Brooks.

Sen. Todd Gardenhire (R-Chattanooga) called the invitation inappropriate.

“Charter has done everything they could possibly do to deny rural Bradley broadband, Internet/content service,” Gardenshire told the Times Free Press.

“Well, my first inclination is to say I’m surprised, coming the day after they killed the broadband bill in committee,” added Howell. “[It is] kind of ironic now that they’re asking people to come forward and make public service announcements about how good their service is. I’m kind of stunned.”