AT&T and DirecTV Team Up Against Customers

[Commentary] Just when you thought the information infrastructure industry in America couldn't be consolidated any further, AT&T has announced another merger.

It's one more megadeal that promises to provide the giant carrier with more opportunities to increase its profits, while not moving the country any closer to being competitive on the global informational stage.

What's really going on is that companies are recognizing that the satellite industry can't survive. Given this reality, DirecTV needs to be rescued. Meanwhile, AT&T wants to maintain the status quo. Although it is primarily a wireless company, AT&T still has some wired operations, and is looking to hang on to the customers it already has in a quarter of the country for U-Verse, its bundled pay TV and data product. At the same time, it plans to abandon (rather than upgrade) many of its other wired customers, sell them on its more-profitable wireless services instead, and cede wired subscriptions in the rest of the country to the dominant cable operators.

We'll become two Americas: poorer people and people in rural areas depending on wireless smartphones, and richer people paying through the nose for expensive bundled services.

[Crawford is a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law]