David Lazarus

I’ve worked for newspapers since I was a student at UC Berkeley, including stints at the San Francisco Examiner, the Bangkok Post, the Japan Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and now the biggest newsroom west of the Mississippi. This is my final column for the Los Angeles Times; I’ll be moving into television full-time. There’s no need for me to point out the precarious state of the newspaper business. This industry is now very different from the one I fell in love with in college.

Wireless customers nationwide can look forward to a big upgrade in service in 2022 — and possibly some major headaches as millions of older phones become obsolete. The wireless industry’s transition to super-fast, more reliable 5G networks will be finalized over the next 12 months. To free up bandwidth for the switch, older 3G networks are being shut down. The big catch for consumers: As many as 10 million 3G cellphones now in circulation will be useless.

Steve Schklair wonders why he’s being muscled by cable giant Spectrum. “It’s been years since I’ve even been a subscriber,” he said. Nevertheless, Schklair received a strange letter from Spectrum saying that “as a one-time courtesy,” the company will cancel the debt it claims he owes and stop reporting him as a deadbeat to credit agencies — if he agrees to resume cable service. A Spectrum spokesperson confirmed the letter’s authenticity and called it “an opportunity to reconnect” with the cable company. All subscription-based businesses work hard to retain and renew customer relationships.

Rates for many of the communications and content services we’ve all grown to rely on over the last year have risen recently or will rise in 2021, and there’s little you can do about it. Pay-TV service providers have watched their revenue decline as a growing number of Americans cut the cable cord and rely instead on internet-based streaming services. To compensate, and to keep shareholders happy, the industry keeps steadily increasing the cost of broadband internet access — and claiming that the higher fees are justified by ongoing investments in data networks.

The internet has grown into a utility, and internet access should be regulated as such. The position of the US government — not to mention phone and cable companies — is that the internet is a free-market service, full stop. It’s not a utility. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai says the internet industry merits only what he calls “light-touch” regulation, which is to say hardly any regulation at all. “The FCC’s light-touch approach is working,” Chairman Pai declared in 2019.

Less competition almost always means diminished service and higher prices. Telecom companies, seeing how the wind is blowing, are responding to the rise in streaming services by jacking up prices for broadband internet access. I get that pay-TV companies are sticking it to customers in part because their programming costs keep soaring. I also see how, from a purely business standpoint, if one part of your business is growing and another is declining, you increasingly rely on the growing part for profit.

When AT&T acquired Time Warner in 2018 for $85 billion, the companies said the deal would be great for consumers, who would benefit from lower prices and improved service. The Justice Department said the opposite, predicting the merger would give AT&T so much market power that price hikes and channel blackouts were all but inevitable. And now we know. The government was right.

The Senate Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on Sept 26 on “Examining Safeguards for Consumer Data Privacy,” intended as an opportunity for lawmakers to learn about “possible approaches to safeguarding privacy more effectively.” That’s great except for two small things. No consumers were invited to speak on safeguarding consumer data privacy. No consumer advocates were invited to speak on safeguarding consumer data privacy. Who was invited?

The next time a big company, and especially a telecom company, tells lawmakers and regulators that a multibillion-dollar merger will result in lower prices for consumers, I hope everyone in the room breaks out in laughter. At this point, it’s patently obvious that such pledges of price reductions are almost always hogwash. Prices rarely if ever go down after a big merger.

[Commentary] Dec 14's the day that the Trump administration will overturn former President Obama’s rules protecting consumers from greedy telecom companies manipulating internet access and pricing. I got a preview of what’s to come over the weekend as my Spectrum internet bill soared by 20% — and as I encountered the take-it-or-leave-it policy imposed by Spectrum’s owner, Charter Communications, which purchased Time Warner Cable in 2016.