| You again. Maybe you should actually read the article instead of your usual knee jerk reaction, which is always wrong. The article is about Verizon making false and misleading statements to the FCC about its use of “Title II”, where it has told the FCC, the courts and the public that if the companies are ‘reclassified’ as title II in the net neutrality proceeding it would harm investment. And we nailed them, showing that their entire fiber to the premises networks are already Title II, and we are using Verizon’s own documents, which directly contradict what they told the FCC. -- And it's not legal to lie to the FCC. Then you rant about something-- “any price increase beyond that rate is a "subsidy" from the public to the carrier.” One day you should actually read what I wrote. Starting in the 1990’s, Verizon got regulators to change the laws to charge customers to fund fiber optic deployments – and instead now-Verizon pocketed the money and didn’t build the networks. But you don’t mind being ripped off or that from 1993-2005 there were no build outs of networks which we paid for. And this continued with FiOS. Going back to the article, not only are Verizon’s networks Title II but they did this to charge customers for these networks-- as Verizon claimed it was building out FiOS as part of the state utility telecommunications networks. As we showed, using Title II, Verizon got the State to charge regular phone customers rate increases – well, it ain’t legal to charge phone customers for say, the roll out of a cable service. Worse, Verizon stopped the FiOS deployments so in NY state, 80% of the state municipalities, and their customers, paid for network upgrades that they’ll never get – including low income families, seniors—people who weren’t supposed to be charged. Then you claim that somehow we should investigate Apple "if they subsidized iPhone development by increasing Mac prices?" Wha? Verizon controls essentially facilities and is still a utility network and gets the ‘rights of way’ based on a franchise. Apple is a free market company that doesn’t control any wired or wireless facilities and I can go and get any phone I want. But you can’t tell the difference nor did you even bother to read the story. |
> One day you should actually read what I wrote. Starting in the 1990’s, Verizon got regulators to change the laws to charge customers to fund fiber optic deployments – and instead now-Verizon pocketed the money and didn’t build the networks.
I've almost certainly read more of your organization's publications than 99% of the people on HN reflexively upvoting this story because it fits with their biases and worldview.
I'll concede that you may be right about some of the stuff you bury "below the fold" (e.g. accelerated depreciation), only because I don't have the energy to really dig into those numbers. But the headline numbers, based on the premise that regulators should be setting rates in the first place, that's nonsense. The government shouldn't be in the business telling private companies what prices they can charge.