Slashdot Mirror
SCOTUS To Hear Small ISPs' Case Against AT&T
snydeq writes "The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear an antitrust case that alleges AT&T squeezed out small ISPs by charging too much for wholesale access to its phone network. The case, originally brought to US District Court in 2003, had been appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. But AT&T requested the case be heard by the Supreme Court on the grounds that prior conflicting appeals court decisions in this area should be resolved at that level. As part of the case, the Supreme Court will likely also ascertain whether AT&T could be held to violate antitrust law without setting its retail prices below its own cost."
Where I'm from that would be most unpleasant, not mention unsanitary!!
War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.- Shelley
Hail Ye SCOTUS
Swift to save
habeas corpus,
ISP codpiece, and:
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
IANA US Citizen, so I only have a limited understanding of how you handle things over there. But I think things like a telephone network should not be privately owned. Shouldn't the US government have invested in laying telephone and network infrastructure, and then lease it out to telco's? Then there could have nice fair competition, which would be good for the customer, right? What happened down here in Belgium, is that the government used to own the telephone network, but then partly privatized the phone national company, which now owns the entire network and sells access to smaller companies (similar to the situation described in TFS). Down the line, it's us customers who get overcharged and get really crappy DSL lines.
+1 Funny Signature
That might be because they [were/are] a [monopoly/oligopoly] whose network was largely built at public expense and 'their cost' is a calculated 'average cost' when the rest of the world gets measured by marginal costs...
Remember that the world of RBOCs has a sky of a completely different color.
That would never work. These guys would be easily bribed with lavish gifts, like cookies and milk. That would never happen with SCOTUS.
War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.- Shelley
I know they never had boat loads of cash, but during their heyday, the big independent ISPs should have invested a lot of money into buying their own lines. Hindsight is 20/20, but if they had spent their money wisely, they could have bought up a lot of cheap dark fiber the way that Google did a little while back. Then, they'd have had a lot of their own infrastructure to play with.
It is a *lot* easier to ask ONE company to conspire with certain Government Officials to unlawfully spy on innocent citizens without warrant or oversight, than to ask HUNDREDS of little ISPs.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
The small ISPs were the ones that were allowing terrorists to upload child pornography via spam and phishing messages. I think that should be enough to get them shut down now.
I misread it as a porn-related article.
The ISP I worked for just recently folded up due to AT&T's DSL pricing structure. The writing had been on the wall for years, but we hung on as long as we could.
Back in '99 Ameritech was our ILEC, and as they were preparing to roll out their DSL network they actually said that they wouldn't be competing in the DSL market themselves, but would instead do the wholesale side and have other ISPs do the internet services side. That was probably BS, but it didn't matter anyway because they were shortly bought by SBC.
SBC dragged their feet for years, with a very limited initial roll-out in our area. As of now there are still a number of remote terminals in our LATA that haven't been equipped with RDSLAMS, and it seems never will. SBC used their deployment schedule as a bargaining chip against the states that were doing things they didn't like, such as allowing communities to deploy their own telecom infrastructure.
Now AT&T is rolling out their new U-Verse fiber to the neighborhood service. Competing ISPs have no way to get this much faster service wholesale, and AT&T is actively pushing people to convert from their DSL to U-Verse. Our speculation is that no further DSL DSLAMS or RDSLAMS will be rolled out, and that their DSL network and support will continue to degrade. Their answer to any customer that complains will be to switch to U-Verse.
At the same time as the U-Verse roll-out they announced they will be raising the base circuit cost to ISPs by 50%. That was the nail in the coffin for us. The rate we paid for just the individual circuit was already about what the end-user could get the full service at the same speed directly from AT&T. That was before paying for the back-haul circuits to AT&T, our backbone charges, staff, equipment, and other facilities. As a result we had to price our DSL much higher than AT&T, and although our service and support was much better than AT&T's it was extremely difficult for customers to see beyond the bottom line (though many regretted it after it was too late).
SBC / AT&T has been lobbying hard to get out of the Telecomunications Act of 1996, especially the provision that they had to provide access to their DSL service. The first blow was back around 2001 IIRC when they managed to remove DSL as a tariffed product, so they could charge competing ISPs different rates than they charged their own ISP. The next blow was when they got the FCC to classify DSL (and future internet service offerings like U-Verse) as a data service in FCC Order 05-150, which completely removed the requirement for AT&T to provide ISPs wholesale DSL products. If it was politically feasible I'm sure AT&T would turn off every competing ISPs DSL right now, and it would be (mostly) legal to do so. Instead, though, it seems they are going to slowly phase out DSL by offering a faster service that they never had to allow ISPs to use, and to make the transition faster keep bumping up the wholesale rates until all the DSL providers are forced out of business.
I wish LinkLine Communications all the luck in this case. It's clear to anyone who has dealt with SBC / AT&T wholesale DSL that AT&T is doing what they can to push out the competing ISPs who use their network. I can't say I'm optimistic that they will win, or even if they do that it will do any good. The FCC and the state governments were bought and paid for a long time ago.