Atomictumor

All of this local stuff has kept me away from talking about the crushing blows to consumerism that the big telco’s are getting ready to rain down on people like me, and some things have gone unTumored for a while.

I mentioned the anticipated merger of Bellsouth and AT&T a few months ago, and there hasn’t been much to say. They’ve been cutting through the red tape of an FCC that would just love to close the book on 20 years of regulating monopolies in the telecom industry (after all, if the government can be a monopoly, why can’t big business), and being pretty successful. First of all, last week Bellsouth and AT&T shareholders voted overwhelmingly to approve the merger (despite the ACLU, being a shareholder in Bellsouth, wanting feds to investigate those pesky reports that Bellsouth was giving the .gov phone records without subpoenas).

Our next bit of news comes from Will Street, where Bellsouth and AT&T both posted good looking second quarter profits. Woot.

Finally, the great state of Kentucky has approved the merger in the state, with the caveats of not raising local land line rates for 5 years, keeping a state headquarters, and probably some goats or whisky or something.

So, we’re pending FCC approval, a few more states, and we’ll have a super powerful AT&T-Bellsouth monster to deal with. Yep, that sounds fun. I’m glad AT&T is starting with us on its great path to resurrecting Ma Bell, that way we can complain the loudest about the high assed internet and phone prices, because once it becomes a duopoly between Comcast and AT&T things are going to get ugly.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 26th, 2006 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Consumerism, Geekery, Whitey Keeping Me Down. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.