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MA Bell Monopoly Versus the Free Internet — Tell the FCC Net Neutrality Is Not Negotiable

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AT&T and BellSouth Have Already Said So

I’m not political. I don’t ask people to do things for causes. This not a cause. This is an emergency. The merger was almost approved this week. The AT&T-BellSouth merger hands over incredible power. THE MERGER ESTABLISHES A A DE FACTO MA BELL DSL MONOPOLY IN 23 STATES, that is to say new enterprise would be the principal or the only provider available.

The Judiciary Committee has already approved the deal, avoiding a court review. The FCC came close to letting it go through this week, but postponed their response at the last minute, because of letters from people like us.

We’ve got about two weeks to stop what they’ve already said they will do.

According to the Washington Post:

William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc.

He’s not alone. Ed Whitacre of AT&T told Business Week last fall:

Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

[via Savetheinternet.com]

Sir Tim Berners-Lee said the following in the New YorkTimes article “Neutrality’ Is New Challenge for Internet Pioneer an Interview on Net Neutrality with Sir Tim Berners-Lee” By JOHN MARKOFF Published: September 27, 2006.

. . . if the United States ends up faltering in its quest for Net neutrality, I think the rest of the world will be horrified, and there will be very strong pressure from other countries who will become a world separate from the U.S., where the Net is neutral. If things go wrong in the States, then I think the result could be that the United States would then have a less-competitive market where content providers could provide a limited selection of all the same old movies to their customers because they have a captive market.

Meanwhile, in other countries, you’d get a much more dynamic and much more competitive market for television over the Internet. So that you’d end up finding that the U.S. would then fall behind and become less competitive until they saw what was going on and fixed it. I just hope we don’t have to go through a dark period, a little dark ages while people experiment with dropping Net neutrality and then, perhaps, put it back.

Tell the FCC Net Neutrality Is Not Negotiable

Since Wednesday, when the Department of Justice gave their blessing to the AT&T BellSouth merger, more than 20,000 people sent letters to the FCC asking for a Net Neutrality condition to be written into the merger.

freepress.com says this above the letter.

Don’t Let Ma Bell Monopolize the Internet
The AT&T and BellSouth merger would resurrect the Ma Bell monopoly that ruled communications for decades. But this new corporate behemoth would no longer control just phone calls. The new AT&T wants to become gatekeepers to all digital media — television, telephone and Internet — at the expense of the free and open Internet that so many Americans rely upon.

Send a letter by clicking the logo below. It takes only seconds.

Stop the Ma Bell Giveaway

I’ve been following this story since March 18, 2006 when I wrote this piece about Doc Searls and Walter Cronkite. This is the first time I have asked anyone to act . . . Now is the time when you need to. One more letter could tilt the balance.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
Net Neutrality I
Net Neutrality II

Net Neutrality 10-14-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

I’m adding this link to the Net Neutrality Page.

DOJ Rubberstamps Massive Telecom Merger by Matt Stoller

This is stunning news. The Justice Department has OK’d, with a simple press release, a massive merger between Bellsouth and AT&T with no conditions and without a consent decree or judicial review, effectively reconstituting much of the old AT&T monopoly. The new AT&T will control nearly half of the landlines in the country, and the CEO of AT&T is already on record essentially saying he’s going to get rid of net neutrality.

Over the past decade, there has been a wave of telecom mergers, and these have concentrated the telecommunications business quite radically. Prior to a merger, the DOJ usually goes through with consent decree in which it describes possible concerns and conditions for a merged entity, which are then reviewed by a judge. That’s what both Republican and Democratic Congressmen asked the Department of Justice to do in this case as well.

[. . . ]

This move, to sidestep judicial review of this merger, is a slap . . . not only at Republicans and Democrats in Congress, it’s also a slap at the Judicial branch, which the DOJ has stripped of power, because judges have shown an unwillingness to accept the idea that concentrating power like this has no anticompetitive effects.

The last check on this merger is the FCC, which may make its decision tomorrow. The FCC needs to include net neutrality provisions as part of the merger conditions, or else AT&T is going to begin its massive merger and planned capital expenditures with the understand that it can discriminate against content. Write the FCC using this tool provided by Freepress. You can find out a lot more about the AT&T-Bellsouth merger here: http://www.freepress.net/att/

FCC puts off AT&T-BellSouth merger vote [via freepress]

WASHINGTON – The Federal Communications Commission is putting off for a day its consideration of AT&T Inc.’s proposed takeover of BellSouth Corp., a mega-merger that some government officials want to examine more closely.

An FCC vote is the final major regulatory hurdle facing the $78.5 billion deal that would create the nation’s biggest provider of telephone, wireless and broadband Internet services.

The agency had scheduled the merger vote for its Thursday meeting but decided late Wednesday to postpone the discussion. On Friday, the FCC is to take up the AT&T proposal as well as a controversial issue known as “network neutrality,” which deals with whether Internet service providers must provide equal treatment to all traffic on their networks.

The FCC did not say why it was delaying a vote. “We are committed to evaluating merger applications fairly and in a manner consistent with the public interest,” agency spokesman Clyde Ensslin said in a statement Wednesday night. “We are continuing to work to complete our AT&T and BellSouth merger review in a timely manner.”

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
NET NEUTRALITY PAGE