SCOTUS To Hear Small ISPs' Case Against AT&T 80
snydeq writes "The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear an antitrust case that alleges AT&T squeezed out small ISPs by charging too much for wholesale access to its phone network. The case, originally brought to US District Court in 2003, had been appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. But AT&T requested the case be heard by the Supreme Court on the grounds that prior conflicting appeals court decisions in this area should be resolved at that level. As part of the case, the Supreme Court will likely also ascertain whether AT&T could be held to violate antitrust law without setting its retail prices below its own cost."
Re:"Cost" (Score:3, Insightful)
As smaller ISPs are also customers of AT&T themselves, they should be eligible (under normal market conditions, for regular goods and services) for price negotiation to lower theÅYr costs, as they are buying said services in bulk. However as AT&T is a monopoly, it is using that superior market position for squeezing direct customers, by narrowing their profit margins. Which, besides collapsing your customers being a bad business practice, should be illegal, as it is an "unfair business practice". As far as I know there is no requirement for fairness in real market environment so that law maker do not care about your regular fairness concept, but "unfair business practices" usually is a placeholder for "Mafia like extortion techniques"...
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ownership of the network (Score:3, Insightful)
No, my friend, that's how it should have gone, but lobbyists, corporate campaign donations and insidious effort to convince people that siphoning wealth from the bottom half of society into the top 1 percent is actually a good thing called the "free market" have prevented anything so sensible from happening.
In fact, here in the US, the current trend is to take the wonderful common assets that were built by the government (like our highway system) and give them to whichever corporation gave the most campaign donations to the politicians.
I know, it's fucked up, but there you go.
Re:Two words (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a *lot* easier to ask ONE company to conspire with certain Government Officials to unlawfully spy on innocent citizens without warrant or oversight, than to ask HUNDREDS of little ISPs.
Re:Ownership of the network (Score:2, Insightful)
The complexity is that it isn't as simple as government -vs- private. There are several reasonable ways to do it. The government could own the lines, and contract a private company to maintain them. Or the private company could lease the rights to them from the government. Or the company could merely provide service over the lines while not owning them.
Where it becomes a problem in the US is that it is not done any of these reasonable ways. :( The phone company owns the lines, yet the money is government. The company also is the sole provider of service over the lines. And in theory, they only get all of this if they obey the rules. But nobody bothers. Same thing with cable service.
Electrical service and water service in the US is done somewhat more sanely. Water is provided by the government, and contractors do the work. Electricity is split so that the lines are provided by one company, but the electricity and service is done by another. So no single company "owns" the lines and can abuse it quite the same way (although some of this varies state-to-state).
My point is merely that it often isn't as simple as "privately owned" or "publically owned" - there are shades of gray, some of which work very well.
Re:SCOUTS? (Score:2, Insightful)
Acronyms are particularly annoying on /. because too many people assume that everyone is familiar with the technical jargon used in there particular field (leading to conflicting acronyms).
AT&T used to actively sabotage competitors' li (Score:3, Insightful)
There were a few years where I had DSL from Flashcom (now defunct). Every time AT&T did any kind of servicing for any of the telephones on the street, they would unplug our DSL connection and blame it on Flashcom. After they did it a few times too many, we would watch for their trucks, and complain before they left to force them to put it back. The only way to get them to stop was to get a line that was shared between DSL and POTS voice. Apparently, they check phone lines for a dial tone before they unplug them, and since Flashcom's DSL lines weren't also phone lines, they didn't have dial tones.
Incompetence, malice, or malice cleverly disguised as incompetence? In any case, it's wrong to give a misbehaving private company exclusive access to vital public infrastructure.
The battle is long over, and local ISPs lost. (Score:3, Insightful)
The ISP I worked for just recently folded up due to AT&T's DSL pricing structure. The writing had been on the wall for years, but we hung on as long as we could.
Back in '99 Ameritech was our ILEC, and as they were preparing to roll out their DSL network they actually said that they wouldn't be competing in the DSL market themselves, but would instead do the wholesale side and have other ISPs do the internet services side. That was probably BS, but it didn't matter anyway because they were shortly bought by SBC.
SBC dragged their feet for years, with a very limited initial roll-out in our area. As of now there are still a number of remote terminals in our LATA that haven't been equipped with RDSLAMS, and it seems never will. SBC used their deployment schedule as a bargaining chip against the states that were doing things they didn't like, such as allowing communities to deploy their own telecom infrastructure.
Now AT&T is rolling out their new U-Verse [wikipedia.org] fiber to the neighborhood service. Competing ISPs have no way to get this much faster service wholesale, and AT&T is actively pushing people to convert from their DSL to U-Verse. Our speculation is that no further DSL DSLAMS or RDSLAMS will be rolled out, and that their DSL network and support will continue to degrade. Their answer to any customer that complains will be to switch to U-Verse.
At the same time as the U-Verse roll-out they announced they will be raising the base circuit cost to ISPs by 50%. That was the nail in the coffin for us. The rate we paid for just the individual circuit was already about what the end-user could get the full service at the same speed directly from AT&T. That was before paying for the back-haul circuits to AT&T, our backbone charges, staff, equipment, and other facilities. As a result we had to price our DSL much higher than AT&T, and although our service and support was much better than AT&T's it was extremely difficult for customers to see beyond the bottom line (though many regretted it after it was too late).
SBC / AT&T has been lobbying hard to get out of the Telecomunications Act of 1996 [wikipedia.org], especially the provision that they had to provide access to their DSL service. The first blow was back around 2001 IIRC when they managed to remove DSL as a tariffed product, so they could charge competing ISPs different rates than they charged their own ISP. The next blow was when they got the FCC to classify DSL (and future internet service offerings like U-Verse) as a data service in FCC Order 05-150 [techlawjournal.com], which completely removed the requirement for AT&T to provide ISPs wholesale DSL products. If it was politically feasible I'm sure AT&T would turn off every competing ISPs DSL right now, and it would be (mostly) legal to do so. Instead, though, it seems they are going to slowly phase out DSL by offering a faster service that they never had to allow ISPs to use, and to make the transition faster keep bumping up the wholesale rates until all the DSL providers are forced out of business.
I wish LinkLine Communications all the luck in this case. It's clear to anyone who has dealt with SBC / AT&T wholesale DSL that AT&T is doing what they can to push out the competing ISPs who use their network. I can't say I'm optimistic that they will win, or even if they do that it will do any good. The FCC and the state governments were bought and paid for a long time ago.