Whoops: Cable Giant Cable One Accidentally Sends Rival Email Saying Their Top Priority Is Killing Community-Funded Broadband
from the saying-the-quiet-part-out-loud dept
Telecom monopolies have spent decades trying to kill off public broadband efforts. Whether it’s outright lies about what municipal broadband will do or shitty protectionist laws specifically designed to undermine the will of voters, U.S. telecom monopolies have long been absolutely terrified of your long-neglected town or city voting to build its own broadband network.
Since blocking you from being able to determine your town or city’s infrastructure needs is widely unpopular, telecom monopolies usually have to resort to paying nonprofits, consultants, captured regulators, or think tankers to demonize community broadband via a rotating array of cherry-picked bullshit.
Cable Giant Cable One apparently didn’t get that memo, and this week was caught accidentally sending a competitor an email admitting that the company’s top priority is attacking publicly funded alternative broadband networks. Not improving its network, boosting speeds, or improving customer service, but attacking the growing number of towns and cities where voters have decided to build better, faster, cheaper, local fiber networks:
“Challenging publicly funded overbuilds is becoming one of the most important tasks we do as a company,” Cable One Assistant General Counsel Patrick Caron wrote in the email.
In telecom circles, “overbuilds” is the code word for any new competitors that dare build new infrastructure in existing monopoly footprints. Generally, telecom monopolies have been lobbying overtime to ensure that the $50+ billion in looming broadband subsidies coming from COVID relief and infrastructure bills go only to unserved areas, not toward competitors that could threaten them.
They’re doing this in a variety of ways, including filing costly challenges against towns or city broadband grant applicants that often lack the resources to fight back, using flawed FCC data to falsely claim that any new broadband build is somehow “duplicative.” Duplicative or not, one of the biggest obstacles to broadband access is affordability, and you directly tackle affordability by challenging monopolies through additional competitive options.
The industry’s usual response, as Cable One does in its response to Ars Technica, is to claim they’re simply engaging in some kind of taxpayer-protecting, altruistic public service as they attempt to scuttle popular, community supported broadband builds that directly threaten their captive revenues:
Cable One has been fairly vocal in local and national media and in other public forums over the past several months about our strong belief in the importance of the challenge process. Cable One believes its good-faith participation in challenge processes is important for two reasons: 1) to ensure that limited public funding is used for the purpose intended extending critical broadband services to unserved/underserved areas; and 2) to protect the network/infrastructure and customer service investments of companies already providing qualifying service in the area.
In short, regional cable monopolies want the lion’s share of taxpayer dollars going to their perpetually, mysteriously, unfinished and fraud-laden digital divide efforts in unserved areas (20-40 million Americans lack broadband of any kind).
They most definitely don’t want public taxpayer money going to something like a popular locally owned utility, municipality, small ISP public-private partnership, or popular local cooperative that’s actually going to challenge monopoly control (83 million Americans currently live under a broadband monopoly).
Understand this: the 1000+ U.S. communities getting into the broadband business aren’t doing it because it’s fun, or they like to waste your money. They’re doing it because 35+ years of market failure and feckless regulatory oversight has resulted in them overpaying for substandard monopoly broadband and atrocious customer service. They’re sick and tired of it, and they’re actually doing something about it.
Regional cable giants could nip the movement in the bud by deploying faster, better, and more affordable service, but it’s generally much cheaper to exploit U.S. corruption, undermine the will of voters, pass shitty protectionist laws, bog grant applications down in spurious and unnecessary challenges, and demonize absolutely any effort to do anything differently.
Filed Under: broadband, community broadband, competition, cooperative, fcc, fiber, high speed internet, municipal broadband, public-private partnership, telecom, utility
Companies: cableone
Comments on “Whoops: Cable Giant Cable One Accidentally Sends Rival Email Saying Their Top Priority Is Killing Community-Funded Broadband”
Alls I’ll say is this: The government should classify Internet access as a public utility—and regulate the industry accordingly.
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That would certainly make a huge difference. They could start with the baby step of holding them to account for claims of areas/customers served and require they show actual numbers, not “up to” numbers.
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“Public utility” is actually kind of vague. Regulation of these varies significantly from country to country and state to state, with some Public Utility Commisions being quite toothless.
For example, landline phones, contrary to cellphones, tend to be considered public utilities. Nevertheless, prices and terms have been deregulated in many places, leaving providers really no different from monopolistic ISPs. (Technically, they might be required to lease you a dry loop at some price, but getting 2 Mbps DSL isn’t as exciting as it was 20 years ago.)
You don’t need to look any farther than Canada to see how “public utility” ISP regulation is failing. All the non-incumbent ISPs have gone to cable, because DSL is too slow and the tariff for fibre is absurdly high (upward of $100/month wholesale, when Bell advertises a full retail internet service for around $50). So, Bell Canada, despite being “regulated”, doesn’t have to share their (relevant) lines with anyone anymore. As a bonus, in the last year they’ve been allowed to buy up several of the independent ISPs who’d found themselves unable to compete.
Where will Canada’s regulatory fuckup go next? Well, in the USA, DSL providers got themselves deregulated on the basis that cable was unregulated, and it was unfair. I won’t be surprised if Canadian cable ISPs ask for the same sweet deal Bell gets.
If you want decent results, saying “regulate it” isn’t enough. The details matter. I suggest “network infrastructure builders must offer the same terms to all ISPs, and are not themselves allowed to be or own or be owned by retail ISPs”.
Re: Re: Customer power? Tech media power?
Isn’t it time for the consumers (I guess, where they have a choice) and tech media journalists to start getting involved and insist upon the replacement of ‘up to’ with ‘at least’.
Oh, and Washington needs to start understanding the damage than the lobbying industry has done to US democracy .. but I suppose that’s a turkeys voting for Christmas issue.
God damn, but your country is broken!
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That would be little more than a distraction. Unpredictable link rates are primarily associated with DSL, which cannot keep up with modern demands and is therefore dying off; and of wireless services, which providers have always tried hard to differentiate from “real” services (with throttling, absurdly low caps, etc.).
It’s not technically practical to guarantee, for example, 1 Gbps to some arbitrary point on the internet. I guess the regulators could designate certain “measurement points”, sites outside the local ISP networks, and require some form of compensation if speeds are frequently low. Or somehow quantify local congestion for shared media like DOCSIS or PON, and set requirements. But I don’t think these are the major problems people have with their internet connections; and, with proper competition, they’d largely go away.
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If you think broadband is expensive now, wait until it comes with a mandatory quality of service guarantee.
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I mean we’ve handed them enough tax money & tax breaks we should be owners.
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But it will not, because the US is a capitalist dictatorship, just like South Korea under Samsung.
Who better to advise on chicken-coop construction than a fox?
Cable One believes its good-faith participation in challenge processes is important for two reasons:
‘As a fox I am insulted in the extreme that anyone could ever accuse me of operating in anything other than good-faith when it comes to the allocation of funds towards building and maintaining fences and local chicken-coops, and I can assure those that would sling such offensive claims that there is no possible conflict of interest in play that might impact my ability to be impartial and help local farmers make decisions to best serve their chickens.’
1) to ensure that limited public funding is used for the purpose intended extending critical broadband services to unserved/underserved areas; and 2) to protect the network/infrastructure and customer service investments of companies already providing qualifying service in the area.
As the penultimate paragraph of the article so rightly pointed out local communities and cities wouldn’t be getting into the community broadband game if the current options were acceptable so the idea that major ISP opposition is simple due to them not wanting the public to ‘waste’ money on already served areas is a grossly dishonest and self-serving framing of the situation, one that completely ignores why communities are trying to set up their own offerings because to admit that would utterly gut the ISP arguments against those efforts.
You really like that word, don’t you? “Feckless” appears in literally every article here about telecom monopolies. Nothing wrong with it, just a little funny, that’s all. And a bit repetitive for longtime readers.
Me, I’m just giving thanks that I’m no longer one of those 83 million people. Ziply Fiber became available about 5 months ago, and it’s obvious why I switched:
Xfinity – 100Mbs down, 10Mbs up… $100 a month
Ziply – 1Gbs down and up… $60 a month
I’ve had damned few pleasures in life that come close to my telling Xfinity to participate in aeronautical intercourse with a mobile pastry.
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The writer of this article sent me a profane note making fun of my disability. Why should I trust this bigot?
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1) Why should anyone believe this is true?
2) You do you, but an argumentum ad hominem does nothing to counter any arguments made or facts portrayed in an article.
Biggest display of honesty since Dwayne Andreas of ADM said “The competitor is our friend. The customer is our enemy.”
Phone companies had their "party line" era too
Evolution of data networks will happen. TCP/IP extends the “party line” telco phenomenon to a much wider area where its more than a one-on-one connection.
The next protocol to replace “the internet” still leaves room for AOL-style services to access “the old internet”, so in the same way that “party lines” faded, so will current ISP’s.
The digital naives are the product of the old system where after paying for an Internet provider, ISP’s collect and sell information, ads get displayed to generate revenue and other data services harvest and sell online activity data.
Thats called mixing with crackwhores in technology speak.
Storage devices are on track for 40 terabyte sizes, where 1 gigabyte used to be “huge” when the Internet turned the corner on the 21st century.
The technology innovation(s) have already obsoleted many of the online business models. Many tcp/ip device are already trash shortly after purchase. The 1st world evolved without them.
To the broadband monopolies, not that they would listen:
Your existing cable lines will literally disintegrate if a competitor pops up? And whose fault would that be, anyway? Profit is gross revenue minus taxes minus maintenance costs. A 5th grader could understand that. Taxes are not supposed to pay your maintenance costs. That’s double dipping, because broadband customers already generate the gross revenue.
And “our customers love us” is not an excuse to stop public-interest money from going to competitors and startups. 1. Your customers don’t love you. 2. Even if they did, you are admitting that you think competition should be illegal.
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‘We’ve put money into our networks so we have a right to a competition-free market so as to ensure that we get our money back’ is not the argument they might think it is.