The Incestuous Relationship between the Bush Administration and the Telecomms
If ever there was an argument for telecomm regulation reform by Congress, this is it.
Both MSNBC and the New York Times have reported that National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell has admitted that AT&T and Verizon, as well as other unnamed communications companies, have helped the Bush Administration spy on people. And during that time was when Senator Stevens introduced his giveaway legislation that would have allowed these same Telecommunications Companies to turn the Internet into just another push media version of Bud TV and the Home Shopping Network, as well as allow the sort of censorship we’ve seen recently by AT&T in a broader sense, by allowing them to discriminate against competitors’ content on their network. I’m glad we got that damn bit of nastiness thrown out. The Orwellian consequences would have been too horrific to think about.
Just to put this in perspective for you, if you haven’t been following these issues. Stevens is in the pay of the Telecomms, who have a long history of receiving regulatory largesse in exchange for compensatory campaign and pac largesse, and this Stevens bill was just the latest in a long list of “favors” the Telecomms have gotten from (the up til recently Republican) Congress and the FCC. Some of the goodies the Telecomms have received in the last 11 years:
- No oversight as they squandered the hundreds of billions of dollars in tax incentives they were given to build out the broadband network to EVERY HOME IN AMERICA BY 2006. What did that money get used for? Mergers and acquisitions to put Ma Bell back together again, and HUGE Lobbying to get more goodies (see next items on list.) And the network they were supposed to upgrade is, for the most part, old crappy ADSL over copper and far from complete to every home, rather than the fiber envisioned and spoken of in 1996 when the Telecomm Reform Bill was passed, and the tax incentives were granted.
- The slow by steady override by the FCC and the courts of the 1996 regulation of Local Loop Unbundling, and permission to price that wholesale DSL at a level too high for ISPs to reap any benefit reselling, effectively putting the competition out of business. Local Loop Unbundling is the regulation which, by the way, made the internet a success early on, and makes France’s broadband network roughly three times better and cheaper than ours, since it mandates REAL competition instead of the Duopoly we ended up with.
- The change in status made by the FCC to DSL from a telecom service to an information service, which killed the requirement for DSL to adhere to Net Neutrality. Big Brother here we come.
- Spectrum Auction Rules which have all along favored these large incumbents at the expense of possibly competitive newcomers, and at the expense of the taxpayer, since it’s been shown empirically that more even handed auction rules garnered bigger auction returns for the spectrum, as well as allowing incumbents to signal each other, via the non-anonymous bidding rule, in order to keep newcomers out.
We really NEED for Congress to declare the Internet a dumb pipe once and for all. We really need some members of this Congress to grow a set of brass ones and stand up to these thieves. The US people own the spectrum. We just rent it to these thieves, who then use it to rape us. This rape has to be stopped. If it isn’t then EVERY OTHER SECTOR OF THE ECONOMY suffers, and the only companies that prosper are the Telecomms.
We also need Congress to see the “terrorist behind every Bush” shit for what it is. The only reason there’s a terrorist threat is because the Top Idiot destabilized the Middle East with his Illegal Oil and Profiteering War. Stop signing away our rights to those Fascists we call the Bush Administration and grow a set of balls where they’re concerned as well. Enforce the Subpoenas. And if they turn up the evidence we all know they will, IMPEACH.
Technorati Tags: Telecomms, AT&T, Verizon, Stevens, Net Neutrality, Spectrum Auction, NSA Spying
