Competition calling

[SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, AUTHOR: Editorial Staff]
[Commentary] The numbers may be eye-popping, but the new Ma Bell is unlikely to be as powerful — or as dangerous — as the old Ma Bell. AT&T competes halfheartedly today for business customers in a few cities served by BellSouth, and BellSouth doesn't even try to compete with AT&T on the latter's home turf. And rather than operating rival wireless networks, AT&T and BellSouth jointly own one — Cingular. As a consequence, the merger would have practically no immediate effect on BellSouth's or AT&T's market. Customers would neither gain nor lose any options for phone, high-speed Internet or wireless services. Still, regulators shouldn't just wave the merger through. In much of the country, there isn't very much competition among high-speed Internet networks. So AT&T could be tempted to soak customers or extract extra fees from Web-based companies. And Whitacre has made some troubling comments about companies such as Google having to pay to use "his" pipes. AT&T says it merely wants to charge websites for delivering faster service to users. Rather than trusting the company not to hamper the Internet or play favorites, regulators should require it to pledge to preserve a level playing field for all websites, programmers and services as a condition of the BellSouth deal. Customers and websites shouldn't have to pay twice to connect to each other, nor should AT&T or any other network operator be able to give any site or service an unfair advantage over its competitors.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-ed-att07mar07,1,3367904.story?coll=la-news-comment
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