Ma Bell put back together again
Tim Wu of Columbia U has written a very cogent article entitled Ma Bell is back. Should you be afraid? with much historical information about the result of the Ma Bell breakup and what we can expect and should fear now that most of Bell is reassembled again. He states, “So, should you be afraid? A little. AT&T will wield power over the nation’s information networks to a degree unprecedented in the Internet age. How you feel about that depends on whether you trust the company, and unfortunately, AT&T has the corporate version of a criminal record. From the 1950s through the 1970s, AT&T—while creating the greatest network on earth—also killed long-distance competition, bottled up new technologies like the cell phone and home answering machine, and resisted the innovations that were later known as “the Internet.” Some will argue that letting AT&T run the nation’s networks is like putting Hannibal Lecter in charge of making dinner.”
One of the best results of the breakup of Ma Bell was the proliferation of other industries that could not even have been predicted prior to the breakup. “Optimists predicted cheap telephones and long-distance service. That’s happened, but no one anticipated the full consequences of free market entry in telecom. Among the bounty: the appearance of a cell-phone industry, the birth of a mass Internet created by companies like AOL and Earthlink, and, in time, the myriad companies of the World Wide Web, from Netscape through eBay, Google, the blogosphere, and Wikipedia. In 1984, no one imagined that more people would be watching lonelygirl15 than 60 Minutes, over the lines once policed exclusively by AT&T.” But of course, this is the problem. AT&T no longer controlled all those lines while they were broken up. They’ve now regained that control by merging all the broken up networks into one cohesive whole again. And with their bad track record re US users of that network we should worry that the backbone might see bottlenecks deliberately introduced for traffic other than that produced by AT&T. Ed Whitacre’s so called capitulation to the forces of Net Neutrality notwithstanding, the merged company now has that much more to lose if Net Neutrality is made law, and millions (if not billions) more will be spent to ensure that doesn’t happen. And despite the hopes associated with a Democratic Congress, let’s face it. Democratic Campaign Coffers are filled from the same sources as Republican ones. No one in Congress is going to kill the golden goose, unless the American People yell loud and long, and even then net neutrality will not be a done deal, since FCC Chairman Martin is an AT&T Fanboy. There is too much riding on AT&T killing Net Neutrality for good, and they have unlikely allies in killing it, the companies that are in other ways their competitors– Verizon, Qwest and the Cable Companies. Until we, the people, take control of our own telecom utility future by insisting on airtight Net Neutrality and Local Loop Unbundling regulations regarding the Last Mile, we will always need to watch for what dirty trick AT&T is using this time. And Ma Bell’s bag of dirty tricks is bottomless.
Technorati Tags: Ma Bell, AT&T, Net Neutrality, Local Loop Unbundling, Last Mile, FCC
