Maxx is dead.

Charter Communications executives told Wall Street analysts that Time Warner Cable’s upgrade program has been suspended, to be replaced with Charter’s own previously announced plan of upgrades and “simplified pricing” sometime in 2017.

Time Warner Cable was responsible for a lot of the capital expenditures underway at the combined Charter-TWC-Bright House venture just before the merger deal closed in May. Christopher L. Winfrey, Charter’s chief financial officer and executive vice president, told investors Time Warner was on a small spending binge, rushing in orders for new cable broadband technology to hurry Maxx upgrades to customers before Charter took over operations.

Winfrey eased Wall Street’s concerns about Time Warner Cable spending 21% of revenue on capital expenditures during the last quarter, promising the more modest upgrades forthcoming from Charter will allow for future spending reductions. More immediately, Winfrey reassured investors the days of Time Warner Cable’s aggressive Maxx upgrade effort was over.

“There is, obviously, the significant amount of all-digital activity that was continuing at TWC,” Winfrey told analysts. “And that will be largely put on hold as we put in the Charter all-digital strategy the beginning of next year.”

Charter plans to cancel upgrades that would have established multiple Time Warner Cable speed tiers ranging from 50-300Mbps. Instead, Charter will roll out two speed tiers to Time Warner Cable customers — 60Mbps for around $60 a month and 100Mbps for around $100 a month for broadband-only customers.

Rutledge

“In the fall, we will begin to rebrand Time Warner Cable and Bright House and launch our Spectrum pricing and packaging in a number of key markets totaling over 40% of our acquired passings with the remainder in the first half of 2017,” said Charter CEO Thomas Rutledge.

Customers in certain states — notably New York — will be able to keep their current Time Warner Cable package for several years. Customers in other states will be pushed harder to transition into Charter’s simplified tiers.

“In 2017, the all-digital project at Time Warner Cable and Bright House markets will use the Charter all-digital strategy, which uses fully functioning two-way set-top boxes with video on demand and advanced guide functionality on every TV outlet,” said Rutledge. “We expect the project to be completed by 2018. We will also extend our practice of performing electronic connections instead of physical truck rolls as we go all-digital, allowing us to fully scale our self-installation and self-service practices.”

Charter only advertises 60Mbps internet access to most customers on its website.

“Our plan is to have Spectrum Guide available in most Legacy Charter markets by the end of this year,” added Rutledge, referring to the on-screen channel guide. “We will launch Spectrum Guide in TWC’s larger markets by the middle of 2017 and other TWC and Bright House markets following through the year and likely continuing through 2018 as we complete the all-digital project.”

Rutledge was critical of Time Warner Cable and Bright House’s myriad of service tiers and prices.

“Through different metrics and stages of development, we can see that TWC and more recently, Bright House had both become reliant on rate increases and retention offers, each of which has various short and long-term effects including encouraging customers to initiate more transactions,” Rutledge said. “We’ve addressed these types of issues at Legacy Charter and we’ll do so at TWC and Bright House during the Spectrum pricing and packaging migration.”

That means Charter intends to dramatically cut the number of service and pricing options and convince customers to stop switching to promotional offers that they eventually abandon when the promotion ends. Charter prefers stable prices for services and reducing the amount of customer retention packages they have to offer to price-sensitive customers. As prices reset and increase, increased call volumes results as customers negotiate for a better deal. Removing the incentive to negotiate is seen as a cost saving maneuver and keeps customers on Charter’s regular price packages longer.

At least 81 Suddenlink employees are suddenly seeking new employment after parent company Altice USA disclosed their intention to lay the workers off as early as next month.

North Carolina’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act requires businesses with at least 100 workers to give the state at least 60 days notice ahead of mass layoffs. Suddenlink’s call center in Greenville qualifies. Last month Suddenlink mentioned the call center would be closing, with jobs shifted into larger call centers elsewhere in the country.

Lisa Anselmo, a Suddenlink spokeswoman, claims some of the 81 workers have found jobs at other Suddenlink facilities, but would not specify how many.

At least 600 Cablevision employees will be out of a job by this November as parent company Altice USA continues to slash expenses to squeeze cost savings out of the cable business for the benefit of shareholders.

Altice announced this morning that the Cablevision call center in Shelton and a back office in Stratford, Conn., will be closed, with some jobs shifted to existing Altice USA call centers in New Jersey and Long Island, N.Y. The job cuts hit hard, with 50-100 employees being employed by Cablevision for more than 15 years, with some close to retiring.

“People have kids and everything like that to take care of at home. So, I’m sure it was sudden for a lot of them to hear this news.”

Employees said about 50 to 100 workers had been there over 15 years, some close to retiring.

“People have kids and everything like that to take care of at home,” an unnamed employee told WTNH-TV. “So, I’m sure it was sudden for a lot of them to hear this news. Some people are upset for sure.”

A spokesperson for Cablevision said employees will be given a severance package and can re-apply for an unspecified number of jobs in and out of the state.

“Over the last few years, there have been investments and enhancements to our Optimum products and services, making them more reliable and providing more customer service touch points than ever before,” the company said in a statement. “As a result, we have seen a significant improvement in customer call volume and patterns. As we look to strengthen our operations in the nation’s most competitive market, we are aligning our contact center organization to meet the current needs of our customers.”

Some employees speculate the real motive is saving money. An employee told WTNH that customer calls have slowed down, but Cablevision is also still hiring workers, presumably for less compensation.

“I don’t think it’s because of calls to be honest. They’re hiring a lot of people to work from home too,” the employee said.

Altice told New York and New Jersey regulators it wouldn’t lay off customer service employees for four years, but made no such agreement in Connecticut.

Sock Puppets: Ostensibly “independent” people quietly on the payroll of Big Telecom companies and advocating their positions.

“Net Neutrality would not improve consumer welfare or protect the public interest,” came the considered view of one Jeffrey A. Eisenach, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2014. “The potential costs of Net Neutrality regulation are both sweeping and severe. It is best understood as an effort by one set of private interests to enrich itself by using the power of the state.”

Mr. Eisenach was introduced on the printed formal agenda as a “visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.” If one looked at a transcript of his written testimony, they would find he also co-served as “co-chair of NERA Economic Consulting’s Communications, Media and Internet Practice.” But his views could have effectively represented all the above and more.

The New York Times this week published a two-part article examining the thin lines between public policy scholars, lobbyists, researchers, advocates, corporations, and private citizens. It is an important piece that details the shady world of bought and paid for research, academia, corporate lawyers and lobbyists, and Washington lawmakers that too often accept what they are told without following the money.

On that September day back in 2014 Eisenach wanted his views to be attributed only to him.

Eisenach

“While I am here in my capacity as a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, the views I express are my own, should not be attributed to A.E.I. or to any of the organizations with which I am affiliated,” Eisenach told the Senate committee.

What was considerably less clear is the name of the client (or an affiliated trade organization) that has underwritten almost every one of a dozen studies he has published on internet-related issues from 2007-2016 — Verizon, the same company that shares his hostile views towards Net Neutrality.

Over the years, it has become difficult to tell whether Eisenach’s views, articles, and study findings are his own, those of his study sponsor, and/or those of his employer. Just tracking Eisenach’s ever-changing employment record was no easy task. In the fall of 2013, Eisenach was the director of the American Enterprise Institute’s new “Center on Media and Internet Policy.” Just a few months later, he joined NERA, one of the country’s oldest economic consultancy firms, as a senior vice president in its telecommunications practice.

From each of these positions, Eisenach can pen the views of some of America’s largest telecommunications companies under the guise of an “independent” study, an invaluable cover tool for a member of Congress confronted with voting on behalf of corporate friends at the cost of consumers in the district.

“A report authored by an academic is going to have more credibility in the eyes of the regulator who is reading it,” Michael J. Copps, a former FCC commissioner who is now a special adviser for the Media and Democracy Reform Initiative at Common Cause, told the newspaper. “They are seeking to build credibility where none exists.”

A former Verizon employee who still does some consulting of his told the Times how the game is played.

“Let’s say you’re in legal and you want to have a paper that says what you want it to say,” said ex-Verizon economist Dennis Weller. “You could have a bunch of economists in house and ask them if they agree with you. How much easier would it be to go to an outside economist and say, ‘How about if I pay you $100,000 to write this?’”

With appropriate disclosure that a company like Verizon paid $100,000 for a report that exactly matches Verizon’s public policy agenda might raise questions on Capitol Hill as to its veracity and independence. If that disclosure goes missing or is hidden under a third-party like a trade association, a lawmaker might assume the report was produced independently and the strong corroboration of Verizon’s views is just a coincidence. That kind of credibility can be worth millions to any company confronting a debate over regulatory policy.

“[Eisenach] is good at linking big theoretical ideas to policy, and he’s been good at making money doing that,” added Weller. “He’s been good at moving from think tank to think tank and company to company, and I don’t think he’s ever lost money doing it.”

The New York Times investigation found while Eisenach testified before Congress ostensibly as a private citizen, he was also filing formal comments to the FCC as a “scholar” with the American Enterprise Institute, was meeting privately with FCC commissioners, organized public briefings that featured powerful senators like John Thune (R-S.D.), who happens to be the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. That committee also has direct oversight over the FCC and has spent the last three years scrutinizing FCC chairman Thomas Wheeler. Eisenach even briefed the two Republican FCC commissioners about what AEI’s general counsel had to say about Wheeler’s efforts to get Net Neutrality in place at the FCC. Eisenach offered both commissioners speaking time at AEI events, urging at least one of them to attack Net Neutrality.

“Net Neutrality is obviously top of mind,” he said in an email to that commissioner, Michael O’Rielly. “I’d be delighted if you would use the opportunity to lay out the case against.”

The Times reported Eisenach was hardly alone opposing Net Neutrality. Just weeks after becoming chairman, Wheeler received a letter signed by more than a dozen prominent economists and scholars affiliated with various Washington think tanks or academic institutions. They wanted Wheeler to reject Net Neutrality regulations. The letter attempted to distance the signers from any corporate agenda, noting in a footnote that nobody was compensated for their signature on the letter.

On the other hand, of the dozen studies that were included or referenced in their letter as “evidence,” more than half were entirely funded by giant telecom companies that oppose Net Neutrality. Mr. Wheeler would need a magnifying glass and plenty of free time to ferret out the industry funding disclosures in those attached studies, which were buried in footnotes.

When the industry took the FCC to court over broadband regulation or Net Neutrality, it was more of the same. Verizon was successful opposing an earlier FCC rule on Net Neutrality by trotting out almost two dozen studies and declarations that opposed regulatory oversight — more than half sponsored entirely by the telecommunications companies or trade associations that despise Net Neutrality. Many other studies were written by think tanks and scholars that also had direct financial ties to the companies.

Litan

Another key factor in the debate about Net Neutrality was the cost of implementing it. Again, the incestuous ties between the telecom industry, think tanks, and academia would serve up the “right answers” for Big Telecom’s case against Neutrality when two economists issued a controversial “policy brief” that claimed Net Neutrality would cost $15 billion in new fees and retard broadband expansion and upgrades. (The $15 billion figure came under immediate ridicule by consumer groups that effectively suggested the study authors ‘made it up,’ a case that may have been proven to some degree when the authors suddenly revised it down to $11 billion.)

Robert Litan, then a senior fellow at Brookings and Hal Singer, who used to work at the Progressive Policy Institute, would quickly come under greater scrutiny than Eisenach, probably because their report became central to the industry’s battle against Net Neutrality. The National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA) even built an advertising campaign against Net Neutrality around their study. Politicians opposed to Net Neutrality also regularly quoted from Litan and Singer’s findings to explain their strong opposition to the net policy.

Lost in the debate is who paid Mr. Litan and Mr. Singer for their work. Their employer, Economists Inc., yet another inside-the-Beltway consulting firm, didn’t exactly publicize their “select clients” included AT&T and Verizon — two of the largest opponents of Net Neutrality.

Using think tanks to bolster corporate lobbying has become so common, it has attracted the attention of some members of Congress.

Litan collided with one of the Senate’s fiercest consumer advocates and watchdogs — Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in a September 2015 hearing about a rules change fiercely opposed by investment bankers that would require financial advisers recommending retirement-associated investments to put their clients’ interests ahead of their own personal gain. Warren has championed the cause of ending high bank and investment-related fees that eat away investor returns. Some of the worst offenders convinced financial advisers to recommend their funds by kicking back large bonus commissions, which enriched the adviser and the investment bank but left seniors hit hard by lost potential earnings.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)

Litan’s research questioned the potential benefits of upping ethical standards. He wrote the costs to the banking and investment community to implement the rules would far outweigh any benefits to investors. Litan casually mentioned his affiliation with Brookings, a think tank, to promote his research’s credibility. He didn’t call attention to the fact his 28-page study was produced for a client: Capital Group — a massive financial services company with $1.39 trillion in assets. It would be directly impacted by the imposition of the new rules, which it strongly opposed.

Capital Group paid Economists, Inc. $85,000 for the study. Litan’s cut of the action was $38,800 — or $1,386 per page.

Warren complained Litan was not exactly forthcoming in disclosing his personal gain and his ties to a major opponent of the new rules under consideration.

“These disclosures are problematic: they raise significant questions about the impartiality of the study and its conclusions, and about why a Brookings-affiliated expert is allowed to use that affiliation to lend credibility to work that is…editorially compromised,” Sen. Warren wrote in a letter to Brookings President Strobe Talbott.

The embarrassment to Brookings, which has increasingly relied on corporate-funded research to fund its work, led to rumors Litan was asked to leave, and he resigned shortly thereafter. Litan downplayed the event, calling it a “minor technical violation” of Brookings’ ethics policy, which prohibits those associated with the think tank from using their affiliation with Brookings in any research report or testimony.

The incident fueled consumer groups’ arguments that cozy arrangements between purportedly independent scholars and academics and corporate entities too often results in bought-and-paid-for- research not worth the paper it is printed on. A clear conflict of interest and the lack of prominent funding disclosures makes such reports suspect at best and worthless in many other cases, because no company paying for a report is going to make it public if it conflicts with their agenda.

Singer

Remarkably, other economists, many also engaged in producing reports for corporate clients, rushed to the defense of… Mr. Litan, calling his removal from Brookings the result of a witch hunt.

A letter signed by former Clinton economic advisers W. Bowman Cutter and Everett Ehrlich; Harvard University international trade and investment professor Robert Z. Lawrence; former Clinton chief budget economist Joseph Minarik; and former Clinton economic adviser Hal Singer, who co-authored the report that got Litan in hot water with Sen. Warren, claimed as a result of Litan’s forced resignation, critics of their reports could threaten the credibility of their work with an “ad hominem attack on any author who may be associated with an industry or interest whose views are contrary to [Sen. Warren].”

“Businesses sometimes finance policy research much as advocacy groups or other interests do,” the economists wrote. “A reader can question the source of the financing on all sides, but ultimately the quality of the work and the integrity of the author are paramount.”

Singer has since left the Progressive Policy Institute.

D.C.’s revolving door has also provided lucrative work for those out of government jobs and now working in the private sector, often lobbying those still in government.

Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) had no problem introducing a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece into the Congressional Record written by Robert McDowell, who wears several hats at the Hudson Institute. He’s a “scholar,” a “telecommunications industry lawyer” at a firm retained by AT&T to fight Net Neutrality, and a lobbyist. If his name is familiar to you, that might be because McDowell used to be a commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission from June 1, 2006 to May 17, 2013. Now he is paid to kill Net Neutrality for AT&T.

None of that seem to faze Walden or raise questions about the credibility of the opinion piece he sought to have added to the official record.

“Everyone’s got their point of view,” Walden said last year. “And some of them get paid to have that point of view.”

…for AT&T’s complacency.

AT&T will pay $7.75 million to the Federal Communications Commission’s Enforcement Bureau and to its customers to settle a phone cramming investigation that revealed the phone company allowed drug dealers and money launderers to offer a scam paid directory assistance service for AT&T’s landline customers.

AT&T allowed the scammers to charge many of its landline customers $9 a month for a directory assistance service investigators called “a sham” from day one. AT&T collected a “billing fee” for each charge and collected another $1.50 in “complaint fees” each time a customer complained about the charge on their phone bill.

It took the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to uncover the scam while investigating two Cleveland-area companies — Discount Directory, Inc. (DDI) and Enhanced Telecommunications Services (ETS) for drug-related crimes and money laundering the proceeds.

In the course of seizing drugs, cars, jewelry, gold, and computers (totaling close to $3.4 million) from the companies’ principals and associates, DEA investigators discovered financial documents related to a scheme to defraud telephone customers. The key participants in the scheme told DEA agents that the companies were set up to bill thousands of consumers (mostly small businesses) for a monthly directory assistance service on their local AT&T landline telephone bills. The DEA referred this investigation to the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau in 2015.

AT&T received a fee from the companies for each charge AT&T placed on its customers’ bills. Although DDI and ETS submitted charges for thousands of AT&T customers, they never provided any directory assistance service. Neither DDI, ETS, nor AT&T could show that any of AT&T’s customers agreed to be billed for the sham directory assistance service, but AT&T kept on billing and collecting money from customers anyway, despite their responsibility to ensure the services were legitimate.

“AT&T ignored a number of red flags that the charges were unauthorized, including thousands of charges submitted by the companies for nonexistent, disconnected, or otherwise ‘unbillable’ accounts,” the consent decree stated.

Under the terms of today’s settlement, AT&T will issue full refunds to all current and former consumers charged for the sham directory assistance service since January 2012. These refunds are expected to total $6,800,000. AT&T will also pay a $950,000 fine to the U.S. Treasury. The Enforcement Bureau has also secured strong consumer protections in the settlement that include requirements that AT&T cease billing for nearly all third-party products and services on its wireline bills, adopt processes to obtain express informed consent from customers prior to allowing third-party charges on their phone bills, revise their billing practices to ensure that third-party charges are clearly and conspicuously identified on bills so that customers can see what services they are paying for, and offer a free service for customers to block third-party charges.