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Baby Bells Open to Antitrust Lawsuits
jobugeek writes "A New York appeals court has opened up the abililty for consumers to sue the Baby Bells for antitrust violations. The question now is, will anyone try to."
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Have you noticed that through out recent years a darker force has risen from the clouds of the baby bells and engulfed the powers that feed your phone lines? Verizon which was nothing a few years ago, controlls almost all phone lines now, not only that, they have given full control to the bigger-powers-that-be to record and monitor all your phone conversations (btw they get paid for this -- so you do live in a free country and you are paying them to record you talking with friends and family -- and it's for your own safty).
.. the like of which we've not seen since the days of ATT monopoly (Then again that might be a good thing (tm). But the issue here I point out is the fact tht Verizon also controls DSL lines. They are the *ONLY* reason why DSL is not deployed in mass here in the US. They are the only ones milking every single mom&pop DSL provider by imposing unwanted tarrifs on the use of their lines.
Verizon is evil and vile, it would bring a stangation to American land lines
Verizon is also after your money. They have been raising phone rates constatly for the past 2 years at the rate of 0.2 cents per month. Please collect all your bills and do the math. This means eventually they'd be charing you a lot more than what you were playing with non-verizon.
Verizon needs to be dismantled. This would be good for you, for the DSL ppl, for the Internet providers and phone sex in general. Please lobby against this vile corporation. They are akin to Microsoft and Clearchannel (story for another day).
Lord Ranamaari
I suspect individual consumers are going to have trouble proving this on their own. Hence, class action suits, therfore lawyers recieve the principal benefit from this ruling. Consumers, should Bell not manage to have this struck down, might see a change in future practices, but who are we kidding?
Well, maybe I'll get a check for $9 or something in the future... though more likely, free caller ID or something else not of the green paper variety.
Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen.
In my area, SBC will shut you down fast if they find that
you're running your own DSL connection on a dry-copper
pair (they don't like the fact that you're getting 1.5-2+ Mbs
and only paying about $20 per month).
I wonder if this decision (if it stands) will allow us to pursue
legal action against the Baby Bells? If it did, and the Bells
allowed Homebrew DSL, you'd see the fastest rollout of broadband ever!
Anyone up for a class action suit here?
How about their little shell game with caller ID and related tech?
First, it's we'll sell you caller ID. Then they sell the spammers an anonymous account. Then, they sell you a feature to block anonymous callers. Then they sell the spammers a feature to get through to people that block anonymous callers.
It's a frickin racket. This is what the MOB does.
Pay us some money and we'll protect you from spammers. Oh, the protection isn't working? Pay us some more money.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
OK, I realize I'm (kind of) defending the phone company, but often what's broken isn't the phone company rates but the tarrif structure and process regulators setup.
The first time I asked for a copy of my office's phone account info from the phone company -- several POTS lines, a couple of ISDN BRIs, an ISDN PRI and five DSS trunks -- I expected a page or two detailing the billing for the lines and maybe a page or two for some extras (DID blocks, etc). Naive me, I got what amounted to over *50* pages of billing information, often for each trunk member there were multiple entries for small charges of around $.50 each. I discovered why our phone system maintenance vendor employs a full-time ex-Qwest employee to decipher these things.
Anyway, the telcos deserve a rap on the knuckles for advertising just their tarrif rates, when they know that's not what people are going to be writing checks for. But the regulators and regulatory processes *also* deserve a (bigger) rap on the knuckles for making telephone billing so overly complicated; many of the charges on a phone bill are multi-layer (fed, state, local) taxes and fees.
It also doesn't help that what most non-rural customers pay for phone services isn't what it costs to deliver those services; cross-subsidies between service types further complicate simple pricing. Again thank the regulators.
It'd be nice if one day you could order telecomms services that had a price that you actually paid and could understand instead of a sea of regulutory nonsense.
Will this apply outside of the telecom industry? Some of my favorite oranizations, RIAA, MPAA, and M$ could probably all be open to lawsuits if this ruling is as broad as I hope it is.
BlackGriffen
This actually might be a good thing in terms of being able to get an alternate ISP over DSL. As it stands now, the thick-headed a-holes at the FCC think broadband competition is cable vs. DSL. But if I get DSL, I'm most likely stuck with Verizon.net. Though right now I've got Covad/Speakeasy (and they rock), the recent ruling with the FCC means that they can be shut off by Verizon quite quickly if Verizon wants to play that game (and I'm pretty sure they do). So then I'm stuck with crappy ATTBI cable with no alternate ISP or Verizon DSL. Hell, I'd even be willing to pay Verizon some small loop charge (say $30/month) if I could pick my own ISP (with an additional charge). As long as I don't have Verizon's crappy ISP service (which no doubt matches their phone service).
So I guess what I'm saying is that yes, individuals may very well take this action as a good thing and start suing the RBOCs for opening up their DSL to other ISPs (even if we have to use the RBOCs for just the local loop). This also might be a good thing for those looking to get into opening up cable lines to alternate ISPs.
It's just a thought (but right now I'm suffering from sleep deprivation, so it might be a dream).
Arent the "baby Bells" still considered regulated monopolies? How can they be sued for being in the condition that the federal government left them?
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.