Michael Hiltzik

Back in 2016, the giant cable company Charter Communications made several promises required by federal regulators as conditions for the approval of a merger deal that would make Charter even more gargantuan. Are you shocked that, now that the merger has long been completed, Charter is asking the Federal Communications Commission to rescind some of those conditions? Me neither. Especially given that the result of any such FCC action would be to allow Charter, which operates its cable and broadband systems under the Spectrum brand, to raise prices on many of its internet users. 

T-Mobile and Sprint completed their merger on April 1. And now — no surprise to the deal’s opponents — the merged company is already reneging on some of conditions regulators imposed to approve the deal. Most recently T-Mobile has moved to overturn several conditions imposed by the California Public Utilities Commission, including at least one the company specifically promised Atty. Gen.

The rift between the experience of Americans able to work from home and those in the service sector, now out of work, underscores how dramatically the crisis is separating the haves in the U.S. economy from those who don’t have much. When a crisis strikes, it’s the latter who bear the brunt of the damage. That’s going to play out this time with particular ferocity in the United States for several reasons. One is that since the last recession we’ve become increasingly dependent on low-income jobs with poor benefits and fragile guarantees of continued employment.

Harvard Law School's Susan Crawford has written a new book,  “Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution — and Why America Might Miss It.” She's assembled her concerns about US connectivity, along with her suggestions how to alleviate them. The data-carrying capacity of the next generation of fiber-optics, known as “5G” (as the fifth generation of wireless telecommunications technology), will give countries that invest in those advanced networks a huge advantage over those that don’t.

For years, the big internet service providers have striven to hamstring competition across the telecommunications landscape. And in June 2018, they essentially asked the Federal Communications Commission to finish the job by repealing a rule granting competing phone and internet companies wholesale access to their copper-wire phone infrastructure.

[Commentary] The AT&T/Time Waner deal is not unique. Its template was laid out in 2011 by what was then the biggest such “vertical” merger in the information and entertainment sectors: Comcast’s $30-billion takeover of NBCUniversal.  That earlier deal united a big Internet service provider with a big purveyor of content. It was pitched as bringing huge benefits to the public — improved cable TV and internet technology, more innovative TV programming, lower prices. Have you seen any of that since 2011? Me neither. 

The world of the internet, as seen by Federal Communications Chairman Ajit Pai, is a simple one. Regulation is bad, deregulation is good. Conservatives are victims, and liberals reign supreme. And history doesn’t matter. In defending his campaign to repeal FCC regulations governing network neutrality, Pai got the history of regulation and the history of internet technology wrong, repeated his cherry-picked version of internet economics, and took irrelevant potshots at some of his critics in the information industry.

[Commentary] Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s assertion that consumers will be served by Internet service providers’ “transparently” offering them “the plan that’s best for them” is fatuous in the extreme. The more likely outcome is that consumer options will shrink. They’ll “transparently” know that they’re being offered fewer choices, none of which will genuinely encompass an open internet. The truth is that competition among ISPs is shrinking, and their power already is enormous.

The argument that the private sector can do things better, faster and cheaper than government never seems to go out of style. But a new report on AT&T’s strategy for rolling out high-speed Internet service in California underscores what may be the biggest flaw in that argument: When critical infrastructure construction is left entirely to private companies, much of the public gets shortchanged.

In deciding where to build its network, AT&T chooses to “follow the demand for high internet speeds and determine where there are solid investment cases and receptive policies,” and prefers cities that have “established a strong environment for investing.” By their nature, these are likely to be more affluent communities with residents who appreciate the benefits of high-speed communications because they have experience using them. But that also leaves behind communities whose residents don’t voice a demand for the best services because they don’t know what they’re missing—or who don’t have the money to buy the Internet-connected goods and services that put additional revenues in the ISP’s pocket. At its heart, this is a strategy in which the rich get richer—widening, not narrowing, the digital divide. One can’t blame a private company for responding to the profit motive any more than one can blame a dog for drinking from the toilet. But that’s what government regulation is for — to ensure that a private company endowed by government with a largely monopolistic franchise compensate the community for its windfall in part by serving all residents equally.

[Commentary] The Trump administration’s determination to roll back regulations protecting the environment, voting rights and financial services consumers has been drawing most of the public’s attention. But a stunningly swift and thorough deregulatory campaign is happening elsewhere in Washington: at the Federal Communications Commission.

Under its new chairman, the Republican former telecommunications industry attorney Ajit Pai, the FCC has cancelled, suspended or stayed a whole checklist of consumer-friendly regulations affecting broadband services, telecommunications, video content and customer privacy rights. Consumer advocates say the consequences may include higher rates for Internet service, less privacy for customers going online and a narrower choice of content. In what may be his most far-reaching act, Pai announced Feb. 27 that the FCC would take a hands-off approach to the AT&T-Time Warner merger, an $85-billion deal between a content distributor and content producer that could remake both industries. That leaves jurisdiction over the merger to the Department of Justice, which is unlikely to block it. President Trump has said he opposes the merger, but he also held a closed-door meeting with AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson just before the inauguration, so whether he will intervene to block the deal remains unknown.