As noted here, AT&T and BellSouth recently agreed to an $86 million dollar merger; based on what I read about this, it sounds to me like AT&T wanted in the worst way to get back into wireless broadband and increase its share of other delivery systems, primarily landlines (they had divested itself of wireless in 2005, as noted here), and as the price of doing business, they agreed to sell “naked” DSL for two years, meaning that it didn’t have to be bundled with other services.More important for me personally, though, is the fact that they agreed to abide by a concession on net neutrality for at least two years also to approve the deal (along with “naked” DSL).
I think this is about as good a deal as we can expect for now, though if he’d had his way, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin would have approved the deal without the net neutrality concession (I mean, we are talking about Bushco here, let’s not forget).
As noted in the USA Today story…
Martin had initially hoped to break the FCC's 2-2 deadlock (on the deal without the two concessions) by securing the vote of Robert McDowell, the FCC's third Republican. McDowell had essentially recused himself from voting because a trade group he used to work for had opposed the merger. But that plan ran aground last month when McDowell, freed up to vote by the FCC's general counsel, refused to vote, citing the same ethics conflict.A cautionary note was sounded on this, though, in a New York Times editorial today (who knows whether or not AT&T will try to scuttle the net neutrality provision two years from now):
The commission was right to extract the (net neutrality) concession, but it should not be necessary to negotiate separate deals like this one. On the information superhighway, net neutrality should be a basic rule of the road.The two commissioners who looked out for us on this to get the two concessions including net neutrality (both Dems – do I really need to mention that?) were Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps. Kudos to both.
No comments:
Post a Comment