Kentucky Telephone Companies Pushing For Option To End Basic Service

An anonymous reader writes "There is a bill pending in the Kentucky State Senate that would eliminate almost all Public Service Commission oversight over local phone companies. Written by AT&T lobbyists, SB135 is being pushed by the phone companies as a 'modernization' of rules. It would keep the PSC from investigating phone service on its own and eliminate rules concerning price discrimination, price increases, required published rates, and performance objectives. It also will prevent any state agency from imposing net neutrality, and will enable phone companies to use the fact that there are cell phones to refuse to run a land line. The text of the bill is available online."

Comments

This Could Be Made Fair

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds like a fine idea. But since they're truly free of regulatory shackles, they should have no problem paying whatever market rate the city wishes to charge them to rent the space under the streets that their lines run through.

Re:This Could Be Made Fair

[Githaron]

Agreed. If they want government aid and special treatment, we have every right to expect them to be regulated. If they want to make the shots, they need to pay for everything.

Re:Sure

[sjames]

Don't forget paying property owners rent for their cables now that they want to reject the strings attached to using public right of way.

Naturally, they'll need to negotiate that with each owner separately.

Privatizing

[koan]

If you need any evidence why privatizing government services is a bad idea this is it.

Open up their network for competition.

[Karmashock]

Right now it's illegal for anyone to run phone cable in ATT or verizon's territory. they have government backed monopolies of these areas. Sure, they are forced to share bandwidth with other providers but those providers have no control over the cable or the prices charged for using it.

Open it up so that other companies are allowed to run cable. They might now run cable... no one will be forcing them to do it. But they'll have the option and maybe if ATT acts badly that will give a rival company an incentive to step in and offer a superior service at a lower price.

All these old grandfathered monopolies need to die. Throw holy water in their eyes, jam a fist full of garlic in their mouths, and drive a wooden stake through their hearts.

If they competed without these rules they'd never even consider this sort of nonsense. Their competitors would eat them alive... probably with fave beans

Re:Open up their network for competition.

[Solandri]

Right now it's illegal for anyone to run phone cable in ATT or verizon's territory. they have government backed monopolies of these areas. Sure, they are forced to share bandwidth with other providers but those providers have no control over the cable or the prices charged for using it.

This is correct. The idea is that it is wasteful for multiple companies to run multiple cables which do the same thing. Maximum efficiency (albeit not reliability) is achieved when there's just one company and one set of cables. So a company is selected and granted a monopoly for laying down and providing service over these cables.

In exchange, they cede the right to set their own prices. All price increases have to be reviewed and OKed by a government-run Public Utilities Commission or Public Service Commission.

Getting rid of the PUC or PSC without revoking the phone company's cable service monopoly makes no sense whatsoever.

Re:Open up their network for competition.

[Anthony Mouse]

Their competitors would eat them alive

That's the problem: They wouldn't. Because it works like this: No prospective competitor has enough money to build a nationwide network all at once. The only way to do it is to roll out in one city, then use the profits from operating the network in that city to roll out in the next city, rinse and repeat.

The problem comes that whichever city you choose to start with, the incumbents in that city will drop their margins to zero only in that city on the day before you start offering service there. The only way to get customers to use the new network is to match the price cuts and operate with no margins, so the fixed costs (which the incumbents have already paid off and the new competitors haven't) thereby make the new competitor unprofitable and leave no profits to use to expand any further. And because prospective competitors know that will happen (as it has happened in the few instances where new competitors have tried to enter the market in the past, or there has been a municipal fiber roll out), no one is willing to invest in building a competing network.

The fact that there is sometimes both a telephone and cable company that offer internet service in the same area is just a historical accident, because by the time they were actually in competition with each other they were both already big enough that they couldn't drive the other out of business with price competition without severe damage to their own business, so instead they just both operate on the unspoken agreement that neither will be the first to do anything aggressively competitive. But if a small new competitor ever started a build out, have no doubt that they would lower their prices until the competitor got the message that continuing to build a network will be made unprofitable for them.

Realistically, if you want a serious competitor to the incumbents, it needs to be municipal. You pay for the network with tax dollars (or a bond issue) on the assumption that you may not ever make back the money, and if you do, great. And if not, no harm done, you've paid for fiber and now you've got it.

About time.

[cdrguru]

This is the fate of the US phone system. Once there are fewer than a basic minimum number of subscribers it will become extremely unprofitable to even maintain the wires that have connected the country for 80+ years. You can assume that the wires will not be maintained out of charity.

Best be getting a cell phone is what that means. Oh, your rural area is underserved by cell towers? Too bad, that. Better move to the city where service is better.

Did you not think flight from landline service would have consequences? It sure does, and it is really going to suck for some people. Aren't you glad you dropped your land line ages ago?

There is no way the government can somehow force the telephone companies to maintain service at a huge loss. They aren't going to do it. And that means the end of the universal nature of the US phone system. This is a direct outgrowth of people dropping land line (regulated) service for an unregulated cell phone service.

The real scandal

[PopeRatzo]

Written by AT&T lobbyists, SB135 is being pushed by the phone companies as a 'modernization' of rules.

Hold the phone, Alexander Graham, what the fuck are "AT&T lobbyists" doing writing laws? Am I the only one whose gore rises whenever our legislators vote on laws that are written by the companies the government is supposed to regulate?

The US gov't is tasked with regulating business just as surely and as constitutionally as it is tasked with protecting national security. So where are the congressional hearings about why industry lobbyists are writing laws?

Right here on Slashdot, we've got a user, and early adopter, who is a New Hampshire legislator. A member of the lower house of the N.H. congress, and he's a big fan of ALEC, which is an acronym that stands for "19 billionaires who lobby for their own rich asses" or something like that. It probably actually stands for "American Legislation Exchange Committee for Family Prosperity and Progress into the Victorious Future", but if I go to their website to get the actual meaning of the acronym I'm liable to throw another 24" LED monitor ($179 at Tiger Direct) against the fucking wall and my wife swore she wasn't going to help me clean it up if I did that again.

Anyway, this ALEC, this lobbying group for these 19 rich guys (yes, it really is 19) is responsible for writing almost all the major legislation passed by every Republican-controlled state congress in the US. That's right, these guys send out boilerplate to GOP run state legislatures who plug in the name of their state where it says "Your State Name Here" on the PDF file that ALEC so helpfully sends them attached to an email with the subject line, "FWD:Pass this bill, you slimy little fuck or we'll put $5million into a primary challenge against you next election and you'll never see another envelope from us".

Anyway, this New Hampshire legislator, Seth Cohn, who thinks ALEC is just the tits tells me ALEC is just a friendly organization who advises legislators and gives them "good, clean code" to work with, as if ALEC was the teabagger equivalent of O'Reilly Publishing or the Open Source Initiative or something. Of course, these ALEC-written laws include laws to make sure blacks and poor people and students can't vote, and prisons get privatized and certain energy conglomerates get fat tax subsidies and schools change their science curriculum to teach the "controversy" that is global warming, but to this Slashdot user/New Hampshire congressperson, it's just "good code".

Lobbyists writing our laws. What could possibly go wrong?

Wait, wait, I've got something here...OK, this is something that dirty hippie, Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1816, and I'll leave you with this:

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.

That's almost 200 years ago, from one of the dudes that invented this country. He already knew where it was going and he warned us. So when I read about "AT&T lobbyists" writing SB135, it makes me want to go out and occupy something like maybe some lobbyist's fat ass with my shoe.