Save Access

from: Center for Digital Democracy

Washington Watch

AT&T/Bell South to Public: We Don’t Have to Pay Attention to the Public Interest, Just the Corporate Bottom Line

7 June 2006

The required "Public Interest Statement" that AT&T and Bell South filed with the FCC 31 March 2006 in conjunction with their proposed merger was notable more for what it didn't say than for what it did. While the 133-page statement was replete with references to the "enhanced efficiency" and "substantial cost savings" that the new Behemoth Bell will bring to the marketplace, conspicuously absent was any mention of how the public will benefit from the proposed union.

For a formal declaration that purports to cover the "public interest" implications of the proposed merger, the absence of any concern for civic discourse, democratic values, privacy, noncommercial expression--or even a single reference to the "digital divide"--speaks volumes. Predictably, the lightning-rod issue of "Network Neutrality" receives scant mention in the AT&T-Bell South statement, which dismisses the concept on page 109: "There is no legal or policy justification for imposing a new 'net neutrality' condition on the merger." Far from a transaction that will serve the larger good, then, the AT&T-Bell South merger is simply business as usual in deregulatory Washington, a union that suits the bottom-line interests of the two telephone giants, but one that will do little to bring us the kind of open, diverse, and competitive telecommunications system that our democracy requires.

On the contrary, the newly merged entity seems destined instead to advance the plans for a closed, fee-based broadband network that AT&T CEO Edward Whitacre has already made clear he intends to introduce--a pay-as-you-go system that will effectively silence nonprofit (and small for-profit) entities that cannot afford to pay for inclusion in the telco's new "premium" delivery platform. Advanced "deep packet inspection" technologies will allow AT&T/Bell South to further control the broadband platform, shunting competitive content (or any material that it deems "undesirable," for that matter) onto the digital equivalent of a dirt road, with transmission speeds much closer to the narrowband past than to the broadband future. And whatever ATT is promising about video won't bring us--or our communities--any real alternatives in programming.

As AT&T demonstrated recently in turning over millions of private phone records to the NSA, moreover, privacy will be an enormous concern, especially as the newly merged entity rolls out its converged interactive and video products. Sophisticated personalization and ad-tracking technologies will permit the targeting of individual members of particular households, whose every online move will be monitored, recorded, aggregated, and analyzed as part of an ever-growing digital dossier that will follow us from cradle to grave.

For all of these reasons, the FCC should reject the proposed AT&T-Bell South merger. At the very least, a range of conditions and safeguards—on network neutrality, affordable service, and privacy—should be adopted. As Media Access Project notes, in CDD’s filing, AT&T should also be forced to divest its wireless holdings.

Links

AT&T-Bell South FCC Filing, "Description Of Transaction, Public Interest Showing and Related Demonstration," 31 March 2006, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.