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New York Threatens To Kick Charter Out of State After Broadband Failures (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Charter Communications could lose its authorization to operate in New York State because of its failure to meet merger-related broadband deployment commitments, a key government official said. NY Public Service Commission (PSC) Chairman John Rhodes said that "a suite of enforcement actions against [Charter] Spectrum are in development, including additional penalties, injunctive relief, and additional sanctions or revocation of Spectrum's ability to operate in New York State," according to a PSC announcement last week. Charter agreed to expand its network in exchange for state approval of its 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable (TWC). New York officials say that Charter has failed to meet its commitments, even though Charter claims it has. Rhodes accused Charter of "gaslighting" and noted that the PSC has already ordered Charter to stop making misleading claims about its broadband deployment progress. The PSC last month ordered Charter to pay a $2 million fine and complete the promised network construction. If Charter doesn't meet its merger-related obligations, the company will "face the risk of having the merger revoked," the commission said at the time. A revocation of the merger could force Charter to spin off its Time Warner Cable division in New York, but it wouldn't affect Charter's ownership of TWC in other states.
Haw-haw!
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Sounds like Charter is about to ..... lose its charter.
They will blame New York State for this, in the entirety, and seek to exonerate the poor innocent corporations of their just and due share of blame.
These telecoms make all these promises to get regulatory approval and then never follow through.
It's about time someone held them to account (even if it's minor).
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Wouldn't requirements like this--promise of some sort of future, demonstrable action in order to allow a current one--be good for an escrow-type setup? An approximate cost and timeline of the project is defined as part of the agreement for it, the promisor puts that amount into the escrow account, things move ahead. As the promisor makes and shows progress, they can remove funds from the escrow to cover those costs. If the project is satisfactorily completed, promisor gets anything left in the escrow account including any interest it may have earned. If the escrow account goes dry and the promisor does not complete the project as agreed, fine come into pay.
Should the promisor fail their duty, the government in question uses the funds to implement the action themselves (insomuch as the funds will actually allow) in addition to risk of the merger being revoked.
Puts an extra stick to the company to keep up their agreement.
If TWC and Charter are booted, will we be left with Verizon as a monopoly in some areas? The same Verizon that reneged on its agreement to roll out fiber in all of NYC by 2014. (Yeah, yeah, Sandy, but it's 2018 now, and there are still buildings stuck on copper; copper which isn't even being maintained properly.)
Just allow municipal broadband, New York. We did that in Colorado and now everyone's slowly getting gigabit. And weed. OBTW gigabit internet is *awesome*. Also weed.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Telecoms are big business, understand to regularly bribe politicians and typically have friendly endless court battles. Local and state governments can and will be overruled by federal courts. This has kinda be the way of things for decades. We pay telecoms substantial amounts to built broadband, in tax revenue. They don't spend the money. Or rather, they spend the money on everything except for broadband. They charge through the nose for relatively modest bandwidth (saving money on their backend). And then repeat.
Municipal ISPs can provide gigabit fiber, often with a backup of mesh WiFi of many/most areas, for very modest rates. Majority of the time it's not city employees doing the work, it's some outside small ISP doing everything. And they still pull a modest but respectable profit.
Until we reform the laws, which means addressing the corruption issues, the bandwidth picture is not going to change. Hell, you don't even need to do THAT. Just force telecoms to justify the money that they are given from taxes. It'd be hilariously easy to charge them with fraud.
Good luck -- it will cost them more to remove it than to just pull out. Much more.
I hope Charter gets kicked out of NY, they deserve it. The company has a major lack of regard for keeping commitments.
Isn't it part of the issue that they didn't built out infrastructure they promised to do?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Charter can just shut down their systems and everybody that is using them would have to switch. I bet the price for FIOS goes right through the roof if that were to happen. I doubt they could force them to sell but even if they did Charter could tie them up in court for years.