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The AT&T-Time Warner Merger Must Be Stopped (backchannel.com)
New submitter mirandakatz writes: AT&T's proposed merger with Time Warner is evidence that AT&T doesn't ever plan to invest in fiber to the home, writes Susan Crawford at Backchannel -- and that's just one of many reasons the merger is a catastrophic idea. Crawford writes: "It's hard to think of a single positive thing this merger will accomplish, other than shining a bright light on just how awful the picture is for data transmission in this nation. This deal should be dead on arrival. In fact, AT&T should spare us by dropping the idea now. This merger must not happen."From the report: Think about it. AT&T sells wires to about 51 million homes, far more than any other telephone or cable company in the country. Because of its large presence in many markets, it overlaps with cable companies in many places -- AT&T overlaps with Comcast in 45 percent of Comcast's footprint and with Charter in 52 percent of its footprint. But, after a flurry of debunked press releases, it's totally clear that AT&T has no real interest in upgrading its copper networks to fiber to the home. Its capital expenditures keep going down, not up. (Would you trust the future to a company that doesn't see the need to increase investments in its core business, and instead is content to harvest profit from its subscribers?)
The government actually backs up these organizations with regulation. New ISPs struggle against incumbent operators. If we can get rid of cable regulations, cable and phone line monopolies and actually bring in fair competition, we can revitalize the industry overnight. Actually a good first step would be nationalization of telephone poles and cell towers. Then allow open access and boom, things are much easier for ISPs.
It's a unique situation, where government would work, provided that they didn't have an oppressive permit process.
Most of the poles and some towers are owned by localities, and most of the remaining poles by government owned utilities. It would just be shifting everything to an easier and national process.
Although I think poles owned by the local government wouldn't be a horrible idea (and as you said they mostly already are), I think being owned by the federal government is a horrible idea. The federal government was never suppose to regulate stuff that goes on inside of the state. The federal government shouldn't be maintaining poles (or roads for that matter). The state and local governments are more than capable of taking care of their own poles. Now if the federal government wanted to mandate that there is open access to them or set certain rental rates I *might* be ok with it but I still think it should be a state level issue and I definitely think that the federal government shouldn't own the poles or really anything inside of the sovereign states.