[GPSCC-chat] Fwd: 74 Democrats sold you out to AT&T, Verizon and Comcast.

[Cameron L. Spitzer]

>X-Original-To: cls at truffula.sj.ca.us
>Date: Sun, 06 Jun 2010 08:26:52 -0700
>From: spencerg <spencer.graves at prodsyse.com>
>To: Alex Walker <AlexCathy at aol.com>
>CC: "Cameron L. Spitzer" <cls at truffula.sj.ca.us>, 
> "sosfbay-discuss at cagreens.org" <sosfbay-discuss at cagreens.org>
>Subject: Re: [GPSCC-chat] Fwd: 74 Democrats sold you out to AT&T,^IVerizon
> and Comcast.

>Hi, Cameron:


>       Have you shared this with Robert McChensey

You're welcome to.  I never try to convince professors of
journalism that they've made a mistake or overlooked something.
The name for that is pissing into the wind.

There's an op-ed from Lawrence Lessig and Robert W. McChesney
in the Washinton Post, June 2006.  "The protections that guaranteed
network neutrality have been law since the birth of the Internet --
right up until last year, when the Federal Communications Commission
eliminated the rules..."  Law?  Really?  What law was that?
DSL service had some regulations before 2005, but they were meaningless
because they didn't apply past the DSL link itself, and they
never applied to cable at all.  Your DSL company has always been
allowed to block anything it cares to, they just have to do it
at the switching office, not at the DSLAM near your house.
Lessig's a genius and a saint, but anybody can make a mistake.

The "network neutrality" they talk about is a custom and a
tradition, and it stuck around after the consumer entertainment
companies took over because they didn't have the tools to do
much else.  (Comcast couldn't even manage those file sharing
hobbyists competently.)  Now they do.


> and groups like "freepress.net"?

Freepress is so dug in behind its false history of "network neutrality"
(that is, that it ever had the force of law) that it would be suicide
for them to backtrack on it.  They'd lose all credibility.
Nonprofits that raise money due to their reputation for expertise
are frozen into whatever mistakes they've made, and they see any
outside attempt to inform or correct as a threat or an attack.
That's why the ACLU won't apologize for its idiotic opinion that
spamming is "free speech", which led to legalizing spamming in the US.
Somebody's career depends on it.


>       Do you agree that the costs of telecommunications including cable 
>television, local and long distance telephone?

Huh?  Can't parse that.


> Do you agree also that 
>the rates for any organization with a local, government blessed monopoly 
>have been increasing faster than inflation -- while consumers have 
>benefited where there has been honest competition? 

Of course consumers benefit from commercial competition.  Cable TV is
way cheaper and better in those few cities that haven't granted a
monopoly to one operator.  But "honest competition" is a slippery thing.
For the first few years of DSL service, the telcos were selling it
well below cost.  Were they dumping, or trying to establish a market?
All the while, the cost of sending a byte across
the country has been plummeting, so that now they've driven most
of the competition out and they make a profit on DSL.


>Am I correct that 
>this is how Southwestern Bell got the money to buy AT&T and how Comcast 
>has gotten the money to buy this enlarged AT&T?  I think we could find 
>collaborators to do the research required to show this.

Mergers and acquisitions are seldom what they seem.  They're
structured to create tax dodges.  Legally, SBC "bought" AT&T,
but on the ground it was just one more of a series of mergers
undoing the antitrust breakup of the original AT&T.
If they'd have paid less taxes that way, they would have structured
the deal so that AT&T was "buying" SBC.

This was all part of the 1996 Clinton-Gore deal where the baby bells
got to sell long distance voice in exchange for allowing their
competitors into their switching centers.  Gore wanted this because
the US was way behind nations like Finland and South Korea in
"high speed" (anything faster than dial-up) residential access.

Of course the actual result of the Clinton-Gore deal was that
the baby bells stopped building "central office" space, so 
there wasn't much room for Covad and Telocity and the rest,
and built out DSL in micro-POPs and streetcorner DSLAMs instead,
that weren't covered by the '96 space sharing deal.



>       I don't think the situation is as hopeless as you describe.  With 
>solid research establishing how much Comcast customers are paying for 
>Comcast's monopoly,

I don't think that's the point.  Comcast may be gouging for television
service, but their Internet access is dirt cheap.  You get more than
4 Mbps most of the time, for under $60 per month.  There's just no
service level guarantee, and consumers grumble but they vote for that
with their dollars.  If you want that same bandwidth with a service level
agreement and good customer service, you're going to pay ten times
that much.  This squabble isn't about the cost, it's about whether
Comcast is going to discriminate against information sources for
commercial or political reasons.

I don't give a damn what they charge for TV service.  Cable TV
is a luxury I choose not to purchase.  400 channels of bread and
circuses.  Internet access is becoming a necessity like water and
electricity.

I *suspect* Comcast is selling Internet service well below the cost
to provide it.  That may be the reason for the "triple play": by
bundling tv and voice integration, they obscure the price and cost
of the Internet access service alone, so they can't be nailed for
dumping.  That should be illegal.  We need a new antitrust law,
one written for the information age, not for steam railways.
Without that, the FCC is just going to keep losing its court cases,
and we get ever closer to being serfs of McMicroDisneySoft and
Omni Consumer Products.


>I think it should be feasible to get organizations 
>like freepress.net refocused

You go ahead and try that.  Let me know how far you get.


-Cameron



>>
>> On Jun 5, 2010, at 10:06 PM, cls at truffula.sj.ca.us (Cameron L. Spitzer) wrote:
>>
>>    
>>> Corporations block Internet traffic every day.
>>> Every millisecond.  It's a vital part of keeping the network
>>> running.
>>>
>>> If we stopped blocking harmful traffic, most email servers
>>> worldwide would crash within a few minutes.  Enough web servers
>>> would be compromised that most people would be unable to
>>> use the Web, because most people are using Microsoft,
>>> and it's vulnerable to attack by compromised web sites.