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How Cable Monopolies Hurt ISP Customers (backchannel.com)
"New York subscribers have had to overpay month after month for services that Spectrum deliberately didn't provide," reports Backchannel -- noting these practices are significant because together Comcast and Charter (formerly Time Warner Cable) account for half of America's 92 million high-speed internet connections. An anonymous reader quotes Backchannel:
Based on the company's own documents and statements, it appears that just about everything it has been saying since 2012 to New York State residents about their internet access and data services is untrue...because of business decisions the company deliberately made in order to keep its capital expenditures as low as possible... Its marketing department kept sending out advertising claims to the public that didn't match the reality of what consumers were experiencing or square with what company engineers were telling Spectrum executives. That gives the AG's office its legal hook: Spectrum's actions in knowingly saying one thing but doing another amount to fraudulent, unfair, and deceptive behavior under New York law...
The branding people went nuts, using adjectives like Turbo, Extreme, and Ultimate for the company's highest-speed 200 or 300 Mbps download offerings. But no one, or very few people, could actually experience those speeds...because, according to the complaint, the company deliberately required that internet data connections be shared among a gazillion people in each neighborhood... [T]he lawsuit won't by itself make much of a difference. But maybe the public nature of the attorney-general's assault -- charging Spectrum for illegal misconduct -- will lead to a call for alternatives. Maybe it will generate momentum for better, faster, wholesale fiber networks controlled by cities and localities themselves. If that happened, retail competition would bloom. We'd get honest, straightforward, inexpensive service, rather than the horrendously expensive cable bundles we're stuck with today.
The article says Spectrum charged 800,000 New Yorkers $10 a month for outdated cable boxes that "weren't even capable of transmitting and receiving wifi at the speeds the company advertised customers would be getting," then promised the FCC in 2013 that they'd replace them, and then didn't. "With no competition, it had no reason to upgrade its services. Indeed, the company's incentives went exactly in the other direction."
The branding people went nuts, using adjectives like Turbo, Extreme, and Ultimate for the company's highest-speed 200 or 300 Mbps download offerings. But no one, or very few people, could actually experience those speeds...because, according to the complaint, the company deliberately required that internet data connections be shared among a gazillion people in each neighborhood... [T]he lawsuit won't by itself make much of a difference. But maybe the public nature of the attorney-general's assault -- charging Spectrum for illegal misconduct -- will lead to a call for alternatives. Maybe it will generate momentum for better, faster, wholesale fiber networks controlled by cities and localities themselves. If that happened, retail competition would bloom. We'd get honest, straightforward, inexpensive service, rather than the horrendously expensive cable bundles we're stuck with today.
The article says Spectrum charged 800,000 New Yorkers $10 a month for outdated cable boxes that "weren't even capable of transmitting and receiving wifi at the speeds the company advertised customers would be getting," then promised the FCC in 2013 that they'd replace them, and then didn't. "With no competition, it had no reason to upgrade its services. Indeed, the company's incentives went exactly in the other direction."
When defining capitalism Smith said that the biggest failure of mercantilism was that monopolies ran rampant. They hired their own armies, fixed prices and gouged, and made their own laws often going against their own governments. Not quite like too big to fail, but too big to control so similar. For this reason, Smith said that the primary job of Government under a capitalist system is to stop monopolization to keep trade free.
Today however, we don't practice capitalism. We have Government enforced monopolies. Politicians benefit from kickbacks and stock options, monopolies gouge customers, and the average person is screwed. IP laws have ensured that competition can be squashed in court long before they ever become a threat.
To reiterate for the anti-capitalist comments that normally follow a thread like this, we are not living under a capitalist economy. It is crony capitalism at best, but closer to fascism.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
is that they bill a month in advance for services that they haven't provided yet. Then a month goes by, and they say I'm late in payment. When I mentioned this to them, they said "everybody does this". Anyway, I'm not in the habit of making loans to multi-billion dollar corporations.
Ever since spectrum bought TWC, my bill has gone up 3 times. Still somehow getting the exact same service, and some credits, yet they keep changing the descriptions. Also, now they are charging me $10/mo rental for a modem that was free (not free rental, free I get to keep it) when it was installed, and for 3 years after. Try to call to complain, get on hold for 50 minutes and give up. Not to mention that the price they advertise on their website is the same price I used to pay. They are just charging me extra because there is nothing I can do about it. Fuck them and fuck the government who lets them do this shit.
The only way to mitigate this behavior in the future is to line up the executives and apply a sledgehammer to each head until it is unrecognizable. If an individual stole millions of dollars, he'd be in jail for life. When a company does it, nothing happens. There is no justice and there is nothing to deter other companies from engaging in the exact same behavior.
The only way to get sufficient competition is to make "the last mile" into a public utility, but allow many content providers in. They don't have run a jillion lines, only hook up to regional routing nodes. By not having to get into the mass wiring business, more content providers can enter the market.
Table-ized A.I.
This sort of lawsuit won't do much, even if the state wins. What would do something about the problem is for the state or the municipalities to take the position that the cable companies have breached the contracts that give them monopoly access to public right-of-way for their wiring, then open the access up to other companies under terms that'd prevent any company from blocking or interfering with use by others. That'd still leave some roadblocks, but it'd remove one of the most important ways the telecoms maintain their monopoly position.
You don't even have to make it public, you can make it privately owned by the person or people at the end of that mile. A few places have followed this kind of model and had the connection to the nearest back-haul link owned as part of the title on the individual houses and that include a share in the ownership of the company that owns the exchange and contracts maintenance and service provision to other ISPs. It puts the individual homeowners in a much stronger bargaining position because now an ISP that offers competitive rates and service gets a few hundred customers and loses them all at once if they provide bad service.
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