Today’s offer by Altice SA to spent $11 billion to acquire France’s Bouygues Telecom and combine it with Altice-owned Numericable-SFR to create France’s largest wireless operator is not playing well in some quarters of the French government.

Patrick Drahi’s announcement he was borrowing the money to finance the deal worried France’s economy minister Emmanuel Macron, who felt Drahi’s leverage game in the mergers and acquisitions business came with a massive debt load that could have major implications on French taxpayers.

“I don’t want to create a too-big-to-fail player with such a leverage and it’s my role to … deliver such a message,” Macron said. ”If the biggest telecom operator blows up, guess what, who will pay for that? The government, which means the citizens.”

Macron is partly referring to the upcoming French wireless spectrum auction that will make more wireless frequencies available to the wireless industry. The proceeds will be paid to the French government and a default by Altice could have major implications.

Macron

Macron, himself a one-time investment banker at the Rothschild Group, said he was not fooled for a moment by Drahi’s claims the merger would benefit French consumers, especially at the overvalued price Drahi was willing to pay. Macron estimates Drahi has offered almost double the total market value of Bouygues Telecom, a conglomerate that also includes road construction and maintenance, commercial construction and television businesses — all elements Drahi would likely discard after the merger.

“All the synergies which could justify such a price are in fact about killing jobs,” Mr. Macron said. “At the end of the day, is it good for the economy? The answer is ‘no’.”

The merger deal is probably not good news for consumers either. France’s ongoing wireless price war among the four current competitors has reduced the cost of wireless service to as little as $3 a month since low-cost player Iliad broke into the French mobile market three years ago.

Virtually every French telecom analyst predicted the merger would be the beginning of the end of France’s cheap wireless service. Investors cheered the news, predicting higher priced wireless service would boost the value of their stock and increase profitability, while reducing costs. The deal’s defenders said ending the price war would attract necessary investments to upgrade French wireless networks and limit the impact of a bidding war for new wireless spectrum.

Drahi’s style of indebting Altice while slashing expenses at acquired companies has earned him suspicion from French officials.

Drahi’s style of doing business again raised concerns among several members of the French government. Drahi is notorious for severely slashing expenses at the companies he acquires, usually firing large numbers of middle managers and “redundant employees” and alienating those that remain.

But vendors complain they are treated even worse than Drahi’s employees. Electricity has been cut at Drahi-owned facilities for non-payment, employees have been expected to bring their own toilet paper to the office, and copying machines have been known to run out of toner and paper after office supply firms went unpaid for months.

After his $23 billion acquisition of SFR, the country’s second largest mobile operator, Drahi ordered SFR to stop paying suppliers’ outstanding invoices until vendors and suppliers agreed to massive discounts of as much as 80% on current and future invoices. A government mediator was forced to intervene.

Macron doubts Drahi has the interest or the financial resources to invest in Bouygues’ telecom business. Drahi has already indebted Altice with a spending spree of more than $40 billion over the last year acquiring Suddenlink Communications, SFR, and Portugal Telecom.

Drahi’s acquisition machine is fueled by “cheap debt” available from investment bankers looking for deals to meet investors’ demands for better yields from corporate bonds. Safer investments have faltered as interest rates have fallen into negative territory in parts of Europe.

French lawmakers, particularly those aligned with France’s labor unions, accuse Drahi of acting like a bulimic debtor and feared his splurge would eventually lead to a banker-forced purge and government bailout if he cannot meet his debt obligations in the future.

“If I stop my so-called bulimic development, I won’t have any debt five years from now. That’s idiotic, I won’t have any growth for five years,” Drahi curtly replied. “I think it’s better to continue to produce growth all while keeping a foot close to the brakes and looking in the rear-view mirror.”

Finance Minister Michel Sapin scoffed at the apparent recklessness of America’s J.P. Morgan and France’s BNP Paribas investment banks who readily agreed to offer financing for the deal, despite Drahi’s existing debt.

“We must be careful not to base an empire on the sands of debt,” he warned.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Reuters French government hardens stance on Altice bid for Bouygues Telecom 6-22-15.flv[/flv]

Reuters reports Altice may be vastly overpaying for Bouygues Telecom and that has the French government concerned about creating a “too big to fail” telecom operator in France. (2:04)

If your YouTube, Netflix, or Amazon Video experience isn’t what it should be, your Internet Service Provider is likely to blame.

A consumer group today implicated several major Internet providers including Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner Cable and Verizon in an Internet slowdown scheme that prevented customers from getting the broadband performance they are paying for.

A study* of 300,000 Internet users conducted by Battleforthenet found evidence some of America’s largest providers are not adequately providing connectivity for Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) that supply high-capacity traffic coming from the Internet’s most popular websites.

Significant performance degradation was measured on the networks of the five largest American ISPs, which provide Internet connectivity for 75% of U.S. households.

“For too long, Internet access providers and their lobbyists have characterized Net Neutrality protections as a solution in search of a problem,” Tim Karr from Free Press told the Guardian newspaper, which had advance notice of the study. “Data compiled using the Internet Health Test show us otherwise – that there is widespread and systemic abuse across the network. The irony is that this trove of evidence is becoming public just as many in Congress are trying to strip away the open Internet protections that would prevent such bad behavior.”

The study revealed network performance issues that would typically be invisible to most broadband customers performing generic speed tests to measure their Internet speed. The Open Technology Institute’s M-Lab devised a more advanced speed test that would compare the performance of high traffic CDNs across several providers. CDNs were created to reduce the distance between a customer and the content provider and balance high traffic loads more evenly to reduce congestion. The shorter the distance a Netflix movie has to cross, for example, the less of a chance network problems will disrupt a customer’s viewing.

If technicians controlled the Internet, the story would end there. But it turns out money has gotten between Internet engineers with intentions of moving traffic as efficiently as possible and the executives who want to be paid something extra to carry the traffic their customers want.

That may explain why Comcast can deliver 21.4Mbps median download speeds for traffic distributed by a CDN Tier1 IP network called GTT to customers in Atlanta, while AT&T only managed to squeeze through around 200kbps — one-fifth of 1Mbps. It turns out AT&T’s connection with GTT may be maxed out and AT&T will not upgrade capacity to a network that sends AT&T customers more than twice the traffic it receives from them without direct compensation from GTT.

Internet traffic jam, at least for AT&T customers in Atlanta trying to reach content delivered by GTT.

An AT&T U-verse customer in Atlanta would probably not attribute the poor performance depicted in M-Lab’s performance test directly to AT&T because Internet responsiveness for other websites would likely appear normal. Customers might blame the originating website instead. But M-Lab’s performance results shows the trouble is limited to AT&T, not other providers like Comcast.

AT&T: Slow down, you move too fast.

The issues of performance and peering agreements that provide enough capacity to meet demand are close cousins of Net Neutrality, which is supposed to prevent content producers from being forced to pay for assurances their traffic will reach end users. But that seems to be exactly what AT&T is asking for from GTT.

“It would be unprecedented and unjustified to force AT&T to provide free backbone services to other backbone carriers and edge providers, as Cogent et al seek,” AT&T wrote in response to a request from several CDNs to disallow AT&T’s merger with DirecTV. “Nor is there any basis for requiring AT&T to augment network capacity for free and without any limits. Opponents’ proposals would shift the costs of their services onto all AT&T subscribers, many of whom do not use Opponents’ services, and would harm consumers.”

* – When a copy of the study becomes publicly available, we will supply a link to it.

Correction: It is more accurate to describe GTT as a “Tier1 IP network” which supplies services to CDN’s, among others. More detail on what GTT does can be found here.

In the last three years, several Wall Street analysts have called on cable and telephone companies to raise the price of broadband service to make up for declining profits selling cable TV. As shareholders pressure executives to keep profits high and costs low, dramatic price changes may be coming for broadband and television service that will boost profits and likely eliminate one of their biggest potential competitors — Sling TV.

For more than 20 years, the most expensive part of the cable package has been television service. Cable One CEO Thomas Might acknowledged that in 2005, despite growing revenue from broadband, cable television still provided most the profits. That year, 64% of Cable One’s profits came from video. Three years from now, only 30% will come from selling cable TV.

While broadband prices remained generally stable from the late 1990’s into the early 2000’s, cable companies were still raising cable television prices once, sometimes twice annually to support very healthy profit margins on a service found in most American homes no matter its cost. Despite customer complaints about rate hikes, as long as they stayed connected, few providers cared to listen. With little competition, pricing power was tightly held in the industry’s hands. The only significant challenge to that power came from programmers demanding (and consistently winning) a bigger share of cable’s profit pie.

The retransmission consent wars had begun. Local broadcast stations, popular cable networks, and even the major networks all had hands out for increased subscriber fees.

Rogers

In the past, cable companies simply passed those costs along, blaming “increased programming costs” in rate hike notifications without mentioning the amount was also designed to keep their healthy margins intact. Only the arrival of The Great Recession changed that. New housing numbers headed downwards as children delayed leaving to rent their own apartment or buy a house. Many income-challenged families decided their budgets no longer allowed for the luxury of cable television and TV service was dropped. Even companies that managed to hang on to subscribers recognized there was now a limit on the amount customers would tolerate and the pace of cable TV rate hikes has slowed.

For a company like Cable One, the impact of de facto profit-sharing on cable television service was easy to see. Ten years ago, only about $30 of a $70 video subscription was handed over to programmers. This year, a record $45.85 of each $81 cable TV subscription is paid to programmers. The $35.50 or so remaining does not count as profit. Cable One reported only $10.61 was left after indirect costs per customer were managed, and after paying for system upgrades and other expenses, it got to keep just $0.96 a month in profit.

To combat the attack on the traditional video subscription model, Cable One raised prices in lesser amounts and began playing hardball with programmers. It permanently dropped Viacom-owned cable networks to show programmers it meant business. Subscribers were livid. More than 103,000 of Cable One’s customers across the country canceled TV service, leaving the cable company with just over 421,000 video customers nationwide.

Some on Wall Street believe conducting a war to preserve video profits need not be fought.

U.S. broadband providers already deliver some of the world’s most expensive Internet access.

Analysts told cable companies that the era of fat profits selling bloated TV packages is over, but the days of selling overpriced broadband service to customers that will not cancel regardless of the price are just beginning.

Cablevision CEO James Dolan admitted the real money was already in broadband, telling investors Cablevision’s broadband profit margins now exceed its video margins by at least seven to one.

The time to raise broadband prices even higher has apparently arrived.

“Our work suggests that cable companies have room to take up broadband pricing significantly and we believe regulators should not oppose the re-pricing (it is good for competition & investment),” wrote New Street Research’s Jonathan Chaplin in a recent note to investors. The Wall Street firm sells its advice to telecom companies. “The companies will undoubtedly have to take pay-TV pricing down to help ‘fund’ the price increase for broadband, but this is a good thing for the business. Post re-pricing, [online video] competition would cease to be a threat and the companies would grow revenue and free cash flow at a far faster rate than they would otherwise.”

If you are already a triple play cable television, broadband, and phone customer, you may not notice much change if this comes to pass, at least not at first. To combat cord-cutting and other threats to video revenue, some advisers are calling on cable companies like Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Charter to re-price the components of their package. Under one scenario, the cost of cable television would be cut up to $30 a month while the price of Internet access would increase by $30 or more a month above current prices. Only customers who subscribe to one service or the other, but not both, would see a major change. A cable TV-only subscriber would happily welcome a $50 monthly bill. A broadband-only customer charged $80, 90, or even 100 for basic broadband service would not.

Neither would Sling CEO Roger Lynch, who has a package of 23 cable channels to sell broadband-only customers for $20 a month.

“They have their dominant — in many cases monopolies — in their market for broadband, especially high-speed broadband,” Sling CEO Roger Lynch told Business Insider in an interview, adding that some cable companies already make it cheaper for people to subscribe to TV and broadband from a cable company than just subscribe to broadband.

A typical Sling customers would be confronted with paying up to $100 a month just for broadband service before paying Sling its $20 a month. Coincidentally, that customer’s broadband provider is likely already selling cable TV and will target promotions at Sling’s customers offering ten times the number of channels for as little as a few dollars more a month on top of what they currently pay for Internet access.

Such a pricing change would damage, if not destroy, Sling TV’s business model. Lynch is convinced providers are seriously contemplating it to use “their dominant position to try to thwart over the top services.”

At least 75% of the country would be held captive by any cable re-pricing tactic, because those Americans have just one choice in providers capable of meeting the FCC’s minimum definition of broadband.

Even more worrying, FCC chairman Thomas Wheeler may be responsible for leading the industry to the re-pricing road map by repeatedly reassuring providers the FCC will have nothing to do with price regulation, which opens the door to broadband pricing abuses that cannot be easily countered by market forces.

Lynch has called on the FCC to “protect consumers” and “make sure there’s innovation and competition in video.”

Unfortunately, Wheeler may have something else to prove to his critics who argued Net Neutrality and Title II oversight of broadband would lead to rampant price regulation. Wheeler has hinted repeatedly he is waiting to prove what he says — an allusion to hoping for a formal rate complaint to arrive at the FCC just so he can shoot it down.

Comcast must reveal the identity of its broadband subscriber who left an anonymous comment on the Freeport Journal Standard’s website that suggested a political candidate was a child molester.

The Illinois Supreme Court affirmed a local court ruling that compels Comcast to name the writer known as “Fuboy” and share that information with Bill Hadley, who ran for a seat on the Stephenson County board in 2011.

In response to a story about Hadley, “Fuboy” anonymously attacked the candidate in a comment attached to the story:

“Hadley is a Sandusky waiting to be exposed,” the commenter wrote. “Check out the view he has of Empire (Elementary School) from his front door.”

Sandusky is an apparent reference to former Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky, convicted of child sexual abuse in 2012.

Hadley spent three and a half years and more than $30,000 pursuing the identity of the commenter. Hadley is a retired Illinois corrections officer and chairman of the county board.

“It’ll be a huge victory for me, but it has practically broke me financially,” Hadley told the Associated Press.

At the heart of the case is whether a person is allowed to make potentially libelous comments anonymously on an online forum. Multiple court rulings in Illinois suggest there is no guarantee of privacy if those comments defame another.

“There are folks who go through life thinking that the Internet provides permanent anonymous protection. This case makes clear that that’s not true,” said Don Craven, an attorney for the Illinois Press Association.

A group misrepresenting itself as part of Comcast is offering customers substantial discounts on cable and broadband service, if they agree to pay in advance. Customers accepting the offer don’t get any upgrades and lose their money.

Stop the Cap! reader Don Nelson alerted us that a group calling itself the “Loyalty Rewards Department of Comcast” has called residents in Comcast service areas offering huge discounts and upgrades on cable and Internet service for as little as $80 a month.

Nelson was offered Extreme 105 Internet, HD Premier with an X1 set-top box, Unlimited Phone, and HBO, Starz, Showtime & Cinemax for $79.99 for 24 months if he agreed to pay $239.97 to cover the first three months of the promotion in advance. If he was willing to prepay for six months, Nelson would also receive a free Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 tablet as a gift. It sounded like a great deal. Comcast’s own website sells the same package for $159.99 a month for 24 months with a two-year contract.

“It’s a very slick operation and they have your personal information and exactly what services you receive from Comcast, so I strongly suspect Comcast’s systems have been breached or some of their employees are involved in the scam,” Nelson said.

When he told the representative it sounded like a deal too good to be true, Nelson was reassured he was speaking with Comcast by telling him his account number and current level of service, including the number and types of set-top boxes already in his home. They knew his street address and had two phone numbers on file, a fact that now bothers Nelson because one of them was an old throwaway prepaid cell phone number he gave Comcast five years ago when he signed up to avoid future telemarketing calls.

“Only four companies had that phone number, including Comcast, and now so do these guys,” Nelson told us. “Something is wrong at Comcast for these scammers to have this information.”

As an extra assurance of good faith, the Indian-accented representative invited Nelson to call him back at 866-694-8573 — the same number displayed on Nelson’s Caller ID.

“Most of these scammers go fishing for your personal information, but the person I talked to didn’t ask me any personal details at all because he already had them,” Nelson said. “When I called back, the interactive system that answered sounded professional and authentic, with options to make a payment and report service problems.”

What started to raise Nelson’s suspicion was exactly how the “Loyalty Rewards Department of Comcast” expected to be paid.

Nelson was told he shouldn’t visit Comcast to make a payment, read his credit card number over the phone, or send a check in the mail. Instead, he was asked to acquire a Green Dot MoneyPak “Scratchable Prepaid Card” at his local CVS, Walgreens, or Kmart and load it with the expected pre-payment. Instead of mailing that card to the “Loyalty Department,” he was supposed to call back and read the numbers off the back of the Green Dot card.

“I was assured everything was okay and this was a co-promotion between Green Dot and Comcast that covered part of the cost of the cable deal I was getting,” Nelson said. “But that sounded strange and I requested an email confirmation to make sure I understood the offer.”

The “Loyalty Department” did, in fact, send an email “verification,” which only further raised suspicion because of its word choices and lack of familiarity with common colloquial expressions. The grammatical errors did not inspire confidence either:

No legitimate company will tell you to buy a prepaid card to make a payment. Scammers cannot afford to accept standard credit cards that can and will be traced back to them eventually.

Dear Customer,

Good Day!

This email refers to the promotion on your current/new services with Comcast Xfinity, this promotion offers you free upgrades in your existing (new services)services of Comcast.

With this up gradation you will be having i.e.

i) Up to 105Mbps download speed. This package gives you liberty to enjoy unlimited uploading and downloading with no fair usage policy applicable.

ii) The upgraded cable package will be Digital HD Premier Package with 260 digital channels with 40 premium movies and 25 sports packages.

iii) The upgraded Comcast voice package will give you unlimited Nationwide and North American talk and text.

A quick review of the available programming is mentioned below:

FAMILY CHANNEL:
ABC Family, Bloomberg TV, A&E, Cartoon network, Disney, Bravo, E!  etc.
MOVIE CHANNEL:
Action Max, AMC, HBO, CINEMAX, STARZ, SHOWTIME, HALLMARK, ENCORE etc.
SPORT CHANNEL:
Big Ten Network, CBS College Sports, ESPN, Fox Soccer Channel, NFL, NHL, NBA etc
NEWS CHANNEL:
ABC News, Weather, BBC, C SPAN, CNBC, FOX NEWS etc.

Green Dot offers this fraud advisory.

Payment Procedure:

This promotion is applicable once you prepay your account for $239.97 (good for 03 months).

As this promotion is brought to you with the Co-operation of Green Dot Inc.

So you have to pay Comcast for the promotion with Money Pak billing card by following 3 simple steps:

i) Go to any of your favorite leading chain store’s checkout counter e.g. CVS Pharmacy, Kroger, Walgreens’ 7/11, Kmart, Circle K, Rite Aid, RadioShack etc, and get Green Dot Money Pak Scratch-able prepaid card (This is a hard paper twofold card without any plastic wrapping in the color green)
ii) Carry enough cash. You can’t use your debit or credit card to buy this Card. ($4.95 Service fee applicable on top of your billing)
iii) Call back the Billing department of Comcast Xfinity at 1-866-694-8573 and pay your bill using that card.

This is a contract free offer for 24 months, with a fix monthly bill of $79.99 after the first three months of Subscription.

Bonus offer: If you are able to clear your billings within 24 hours,  you will automatically will be qualified to earn 100 Loyalty Reward points as good as cash from Comcast Xfinity that can be redeemed by you any time to get one month of extra services.

Bonus offer: If you are able to pay for 06 months of service up front, you will be qualified to receive a Samsung Galaxy Tab® 4 tablet free.

Please feel free to contact for further queries from 8am till 6:30pm PST (Operational timings) at 1-866-694-8573.

Regards,
David Clarke
Employee ID LHM
Loyalty Rewards Department
Comcast Xfinity

*  30 Days money back guarantee. No cancellation or recurring fee applied.

This is a service-related email. Comcast will occasionally send you service-related emails to inform you of service changes, upgrades or new benefits. Services and features are subject to Comcast’s standard terms and conditions of service and are subject to change. Copyright 2015 Comcast. All other trademarks are properties of their respective owners. Comcast respects your privacy.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/Green Dot BBB MoneyPak Scams What You Need to Know 6-2015.mp4[/flv]

The Better Business Bureau offers its advice about how to avoid Green Dot MoneyPak schemes, which are increasingly common online. (:55)

“That email message convinced me it was all a scam,” Nelson said. “No cable company would write something like this and send it out to customers. They also don’t apparently realize Walgreens and 7-11 have nothing to do with each other. Can you imagine Comcast telling a customer they have to get the ‘green’ prepaid card -without- the plastic wrapping. Most of their customers cannot understand their monthly bill. They are not going to understand the confusing world of prepaid credit cards. It made no sense.”

Stop the Cap! called the “Loyalty Rewards Department of Comcast” and we were disconnected each time we asked a question that did not involve taking advantage of their offer. We called back, trying different departments, and each time we were connected to the same Indian-accented man who had hung up on us before. After the fifth call, they blocked our phone number from reaching them.

We next called Comcast’s security department and got nowhere. They were not interested because we were not Comcast customers inside a Comcast service area and invited us to have our reader call them directly. When Nelson tried, he was left on hold for over 45 minutes and when he finally spoke to someone, they couldn’t be bothered.

“It amazed me how little interest they showed in this operation, which has apparently suckered customers all over the country,” Nelson said. “I asked them to call the number and hear how these people are directly misrepresenting themselves as Comcast, right down to repeating their Xfinity slogans. The representative seemed to have heard the same story before and seemed mostly concerned about telling me Comcast was not responsible for any money paid to the scam artists. They did not even seem to care when I told them they had my personal Comcast account information and suggested the scammers got it off Facebook. Yeah, because I always put my Comcast account number on Facebook, if I used Facebook.”

With further investigation, Stop the Cap! identified several numbers (as well as currently active 866-694-8573) associated with this operation. If any of these numbers call you, hang up: 855-328-7913, 855-859-6946, 800-526-1037, and 800-399-5791.

If you were scammed by these people or have other useful information to share about your experiences with them, please share in the comment section.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WWMT Kalamazoo Scam targeting Comcast customers makes appearance in Michigan 6-18-15.flv[/flv]

WWMT in Kalamazoo, Mich. reports the Comcast Loyalty Rewards scam has affected customers across Michigan through aggressive telemarketing campaigns. (2:01)