AT&T CEO Attacks Network Neutrality

Verteiron writes "The former CEO of AT&T, Ed Whitacre, had some interesting remarks to make about Net Neutrality during his parting speech. Choice quotes include his plans for getting anti-neutrality legislation through: "Will Congress let us do it?" Whitacre asks his colleagues. "You bet they will — cuz we don't call it cashin' in. We call it 'deregulation.' " More information on AT&T's attitude problem and a video of the speech are available. There's no sign that his replacement is any better."

flashbacks to Bush's speeches in F911 anyone?

[jollyreaper]

"There's a problem. It's called Net Neutrality," Whitacre told the heirs to AT&T's telecommunications empire. "Well, frankly, we say to hell with that. We're gonna put up some toll booths and start charging admission."

"Will Congress let us do it?" Whitacre asks his colleagues. "You bet they will -- cuz we don't call it cashin' in. We call it 'deregulation.' "

This sounds like the kind of stuff I'd make up if I wanted to put words in his mouth. What next? "First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the internets."

Reminds me of Bush's candid comments we got to see in Fahrenheit 9-11. "This is an impressive crowd - the haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elites; I call you my base."

Question: did this guy know there was a camera rolling?

Voting time

[packetmon]

For those Americans here who are of voting age, I suggest you start voicing opinions to congress speak to your management if you are in the telco/networking field and make noise. All this "wah wah wah" on a forum is pointless. Sure I can hear you, the trolls can hear you, but I doubt political parties can hear you. Start filling up those blogs of parties who want to "strike a pose" on the technology sector "We're hip... We have a blog" ... Oh so you do Senator Whatever... Start /.'ing them for straightforward answers, comments and plans. Anything else is just linenoise

Frustrating.

[MaWeiTao]

The people running these companies always espouse the advantages of the free market, how essential it is for their survival. And yet, these same jerks will be the first ones crying for government protection the second they start feeling threatened. All this serves to do is erode confidence in the free market system. Inevitably, once people start catching on to what's going on they start calling for excessive government control which can end up doing more harm than good. You'd think these idiots at these companies would be wary of that sort of backlash. Ultimately, it's not the system that's the problem but rather lobbyists, corrupt politicians, and an ignorant population.

That's the ultimate problem here. People don't know this is going on, first of all. I suppose the media doesn't deem it exciting enough to report this. But it wouldn't make a difference if they did because most people likely wouldn't care. Even worse, they probably wouldn't even see anything wrong with what AT&T wants to do.

People have gotten so used to paying for every little thing that they be able to justify AT&T's position. I suspect that's one of the underlying motivations for this trend. Companies are realizing just how tolerant consumers are of this nonsense. I've read that recent studies have found that consumers are growing increasingly comfortable with monthly payments. A company can raise rates on a regular basis and few complain.

People like to whine about gasoline prices, but Americans are still paying far less than most of the rest of the world. And it's still cheaper per gallon that a lot of other things they consume. They're getting screwed worse in other ways and don't even realize it or even care. It's frustrating sometimes to see all this ignorance and to see this disdain for the people on the part of the politicians.

Re:What's all the fuss?

[MindStalker]

Actually deregulation of the airlines has helped, the big airlines have crumbled because they can't compete with the smaller more nimble airlines. This is the way it should be.

Air travel isn't a natural monopoly though.

Re:Product differentiation is BASIC

[Arielholic]

"net neutrality" has never really existed. Some people get better service 'cuz their ISPs are more competant [less incompetant] about setting up multi-homing, external links and their routers. (...) Instead of everyone having the same (erratic) latency, some people will pay for better, and the rest will get slightly worse.

It seems like you don't understand the issue at hand. Net neutrality is not about differences in connection speed, but about artificial differences between services, based on the amount of money paid to the owner of the tubes the data passes.

Re:Devil's Advocate

[aussie_a]

Imagine being given access to public land for the benefit of the public, and the public then getting told that this company was going to now perform extortion because of the trust they were given.

Re:Subject

[jollyreaper]

Why does AT&T hate America?

Because there's a higher profit margin in exploiting America than loving it.

Let's make Ed Whitacre a deal...

[StandardCell]

AT&T and all the big telcos can have their net neutrality repealed. In return, AT&T and all the telcos will give back all of the government's money, adjusted for inflation and bearing the prime rate of interest, that was given to them as investments, tax breaks, and other "incentives" to build up their network. Shake on it?

Mod parent Insightful, not Funny

[imikem]

I can't think of much less funny than the prospect of something analogous to this. Shitbags like Whitacre should be called out for their disgustingly open money grabs. As should their associated bagshits in Congress. Make it loud and clear: the US pioneered the internet, and users here expect, nay DEMAND, that our TAXPAYER FINANCED public networks be available under the most non-descriminatory conditions that can be arranged. This is not negotiable.

While Whitacre and his ilk are busy partying away megamillions, and brazenly demanding even more even though little has been done since 2000 to extend broadband reach here, other countries are passing us by to benefit from our investments.

A modest suggestion: AT&T, try plowing a billion or two back into the infrastructure in this country instead of whining for the ability to double/triple dip on connection charges, and you'll likely notice that your market grows without customers wanting to tar/feather/dismember you and piss on your grave.

Re:Regulation may give more freedom

[jollyreaper]

I hope the fuzzier minded GOP congressmen don't get too confused on this - the "deregulation" banner AT&T are flying under sounds good but consider the financial equity markets: heavily regulated and you won't find an investment banker (paragons of free market capitalism) who'd want it any other way. Certain foundation structures like markets, networks need to be regulated to keep them neutral, transparent & useful. This enables freedom, paradoxical perhaps but pretty obvious.

When you are thinking logically, you are exactly right. I totally agree with you. Would a fisherman support the destruction of the fisheries that are his very livelihood? You wouldn't think so but then you see some fishermen go out there and take a huge catch for great profit this season, not seeming to care that his actions this season will leave less for him to harvest next season and the season following. "But of course he has to catch what he can now, his children ain't gonna eat on moonbeams and well-wishes from fish-huggers!" Yes. So the fisherman will destroy his chance of eating tomorrow so he won't starve today. I can see how the mistake is made.

Corporations fall into this same pattern. They have to make the numbers this quarter, THE NUMBERS, YOU DUMB FUCK! COKE IS FOR CLOSERS! etc etc. So that's where you see the fans of deregulation coming in. Have you noticed the dismantling of the rules and regs put in place after the '29 crash to make sure that we wouldn't have another one? With the rules in place, you can have a reasonable profit for years to come. Without the rules you can make a fucking killing...and I guess you'd better hope that goose has a lot of meat on the bones because that's all you'll be eating as the markets struggle to recover.

Re:Frustrating.

[jollyreaper]

The people running these companies always espouse the advantages of the free market, how essential it is for their survival. And yet, these same jerks will be the first ones crying for government protection the second they start feeling threatened.

And thus we get to the heart of the matter: they have no motivation but the accumulation of wealth. The religions and philosophies they promote are merely justifications for it, pretenses that will be dropped the moment they threaten the continued accumulation of wealth. They'll sing the praises of the free market up until the point it tries to bite them, then they will club it to death with their diamond-tipped canes.

Re:stay on your own side of the pond

[Anonymous Coward]

The US Profiteered from the wars in Europe TWICE. Next time you check, don't use Hollywood as your source.

People keep misunderstanding net neutrality

[jonwil]

What its about is ISPs faced with the rapid growth of sites like YouTube which their network just cant handle.

They have 3 options:
1.They can increase their prices so that they can afford to expand their network so it can handle the increased amount of multimedia traffic.
2.They can introduce limits on how much you can download so that your $x per month only includes 10GB of transfers or 5GB of transfers or whatever.
or 3.They can throttle access to the high bandwidth multimedia sites unless those sites are willing to pay money to the ISP to cover the fact that the ISPs network cant handle the traffic.

The ISPs don't want to pick option 1 because they would loose customers to other ISPs who didnt pick option 1 (or with networks that aren't yet congested enough for the ISP to need to pick an option)
They don't want to pick option 2 either because most consumers don't have a clue how much bandwidth they are using or how much data they are transferring (unlike, say, phone calls where costs are based on how long you are on the phone which is an easy thing to measure). So if ISPs start setting limits, they would loose customers who would think "I don't want to be hit with a bill at the end of the month and I don't have a clue how much I am downloading so I will find an ISP that has no such restrictions"
So, ISPs faced with increasingly congested networks want to be able to throttle back speeds to known high bandwidth sites. That or have the site pay up to get better treatment.

Anyone who says net neutrality is about QoS or common carrier or anything else is wrong. The issue at stake here is simply that ISPs want to throttle high bandwidth sites and protocols unless they are paid money by the owners of those sites.

Re:Welcome to the future.

[Fastolfe]

Why would you continue to give your business to an Internet provider that did this?

Re:What's all the fuss?

[ak3ldama]

No CEO is worth the $20 million buyout to get his ass out the door. Every engineer, sales person, assembly line worker is worth at least double what they get. These people make smart decisions every day that help the company improve process or save money. They just don't get proper recognition, whereas the @#$!ing CEO knows how to blow his own horn and annoy everyone. I wish they would charge the CEO $20 million when they fuck up drastically, it seems only fair.

Re:What's all the fuss?

[jollyreaper]

The people who make the product aren't the brains of the company. If they were, they wouldn't be slaving away on the assembly lines.

Quit being ridiculous. They're already getting paid what they're worth.

This is precisely the attitude I'm talking about. Thank you for providing such a succinct example.

And from further down the thread:

They might be getting paid what their market worth is but somehow this doesn't seem fair on a human level. Don't get me wrong, I love global capitalism as much as the next guy. It's just that the divide between rich a poor seems to be getting bigger through unnatural corruption of the system.

Right. If we might make an analogy to farming, what's going on right now is the farmer is putting in the same cash crop season after season, leeching the soil of nutrients. He refuses to rotate crops or let the field sit fallow for a season, even though that would be better for his long-term profits, because it would impact his short-term profit. He can do this for a while but the field will eventually give out. But in this example I guess the farmer has his eye on some forest land he's planning to slash and burn.

This is not good corporate stewardship, this is not good citizenship, this is bad for America. Hell, it's bad for capitalism! But you can't get the people mainlining greenbacks to step back and take an honest look.

For a more direct example, I live in South Florida. We're heading into a serious water crisis. Our growth has outstripped our ability to supply water to the masses. Right now, the cost of water is still relatively cheap, especially for the mega-rich. So while we have watering restrictions on because of the drought, they're still watering their mansion lawns. Oh, a fine? That can be taken in stride, keep the water flowing. The market supports this behavior, of course. The typical free market response would be to raise the price of the water to the point at which the rich would curb their behavior. But the rich would still be watering their lawns long after the poor can no longer afford to drink water, let alone do their laundry. Personally I think the water utilities should just bite the bullet and go with desalinization plants and use nuke plants to provide the required energy. We haven't built a nuke plant in this country in 30 years. The old designs suck but the newer ones coming out overseas are very encouraging; cannot go "critical" and have a meltdown, reburns nuclear waste so there's less total waste coming out of the reactor to bury, etc. I'll take this over a coal plant any day.

Re:Subject

[Pig Hogger]

Not if the government steps in and incurs some heavy fines or something...

You're new around here, aren't you???

Well

[Mateo_LeFou]

'cause the barriers to entry in this market are so incredibly high that you often have no choice. If two providers (the cable and DSL co for a region) do this, that's sufficient.

Re:What's all the fuss?

[jez9999]

The state I'm living in now "deregulated" by saying that local phone companies had to open their lines to any provider that I choose.

I'd call that very strong regulation. I think it's just a different kind of regulation, but it sure aint deregulation. Deregulation would be saying, "the line's yours. Go ahead and do what you want. Hell, the owners have a right to profit out of their infrastructure!" The company wouldn't open the line up to competition, and you'd be screwed as hell.

Re:Welcome to the future.

[antv]

Because the only other options in most areas are dial-up (slow), cellular (slow and expensive) and satellite (crazy latency).
Infinitely large number of broadband options (two, that is) are only available in big cities like NYC. And even then both ISPs could be doing this and you still will be screwed.

Re:stay on your own side of the pond

[aussie_a]

Anytime there is a war in a major oil producing country the price of oil spikes. This really does not benefit us at all.

You assume what's good for us is good for the engineers behind the war. The oil costs do not rise, merely the prices, this is of great benefit to those who make their fortune in oil, such as George Bush. Haliburton on the other hand been given quite a help from one of the other engineers behind the war. No, the war most definitely does benefit those who engineered it.

When we send troops we get yelled at for being heavy handed

Bush had my support in Afghanistan he lost it in Iraq. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to realize why Bush lost my support.

Re:Voting time

[shelterpaw]

Beyond your politician, the other way to vote is with your wallet. If something like this goes through, then you have to hit them wear it hurts. I'm not sure it'll have much of an effect, but you do your best.

On another note, just hearing about this makes me want to drop cingular/at&t.

Re:stay on your own side of the pond

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

But you ignore the fact that if we did nothing, the face of Europe would be VERY different today.

That's not what "war for oil" means

[spun]

You seem to think that when people claim that "we" went to war for oil, that means that the US went to war for cheaper oil for its citizens. That is not what we mean. We mean that the rich and powerful took us to war to procure a reliable source of oil to sell to US citizens for outrageous profits. See the difference? There is no we. There is them getting rich, and you getting fucked.

And it's not just oil. We have outsourced much of our armed services to private contractors. The military industrial complex is having a field day, and making record profits. Citizens are scared into accepting all sorts of draconian restrictions. Huge bundles of cash simply disappear. The wealthy and well connected profit. And we lose rather than gain security.

Re:stay on your own side of the pond

[lupis42]

Hang on, are you saying that Iraqis are the "murderous, rage infected and hyper-religious chimps"? Because I went all the way through that post before it occurred to me that that you weren't talking about Americans (I am an American, and I am proud of my country, but only up to about 1969. After the moon landing, it's been a pretty steady downhill)

Re:Subject

[hondo77]

Because AT&T hates freedom.

Re:Product differentiation is BASIC

[Lockejaw]

Their ISP will assure them of connectivity, and suffer complaints if they don't provide it.

Unless Google's ISP runs cable from google to you, Google's ISP cannot guarantee that you and Google can connect.

In any case, Google should only be paying Google's ISP, and you should only be paying your ISP. AT&T shouldn't be collecting money from Google in exchange for giving its own customers reasonably quick access to Google. You say Google will complain to their ISP? What's Google's ISP going to do to AT&T? Cry and beg?

Re:stay on your own side of the pond

[sgt_doom]

remember that we also have the most well developed (maybe overly developed) news and information system in the world.

Great God Almighty!!!! Are you hopelessly nuts? We have almost little or no actual news reportage in the US today - especially as opposed to when I was a kid back in the '50s. How many Americans are aware of the (at least) 2 attempted assassination/coups of democratically-elected President Hugo Chavez by the Bush Administration (can you spell o-i-l???)? How many Americans are aware of the second attempt - led by undersecretary of state, Otto Reich and his Cuban-American squads? Erroneously reported in American news as Cuban dissidents being sighted in Caracas at that time!!!! Un-frigging-believable!!!

...I'd guess that our (generally) staunch stand in favor of free press...

Great God Almighty!!! Free press??? WTF have you been smoking, dood??? Any intelligent American is forced to read the foreign press and blogosphere for any and all news as the only breaking news in America today concerns either Paris Hilton or the deposition of Anna Nicole Smith's corpse. Nothing, but nothing gets reported in the news.

Forty and fifty years ago that testimony of Monica Goodling before congress (ya know, the one where she testified that the attorney general [Gonzo or AGAG], and the assistant attorney general both committed perjury, that there was massive election fraud ["caging"] and that the US attorneys were replaced to prevent any prosecution of past - and future - election fraud) would have been front-page news for days, if not months. Today, nothing........

Re:Easy Fix

[mc6809e]

You want access to public easements to run your fiber? You play by common carrier rules. The public owns that land and are granting you temporary, paid rights to use it and reserve the right to revoke it at any time, including seizing ownership of anything on that land. You lose temporary rights when you start serving yourself instead of serving the public.

It's more owned by the government than the public, though, right? I mean, if it were really publicly owned, then everyone would be able to used it and we wouldn't have local monopolies.

Instead, the government decides who can and who cannot use it. Control of use is the essence of ownership. If the government controls access, then the government owns it.

The same thing happens with use of the radio spectrum. Are they really public airwaves or do they belong to the political party in charge?

Hugo Chavez has made it obvious just who it is owns the airwaves in Venezuela.

Re:That's not what "war for oil" means

[spun]

Hoo, boy. Turning off the oil taps would definitely fuck with the world's economy, for sure. But, the thing that I have come to realize is that nations, peoples and religions rarely fight each other. The rich and powerful of the world are engaged in a great game. We are their pawns. While it looks like they are fighting each other, when it comes down to it, that is a game. They are fighting to stay on top, and us on the bottom.

My point? They will never make a move in the great game that weakens their position against us, the little people. No matter how much it would hurt their opponents. That's just the way the game is played, and any ruling class person who defects and takes the side of the little people is anathema, outlaw, outside the rules of the game.

So the oil owners will never turn off the taps because it hurts their position vis a vis the rest of us, even if it wins them some points in the game. There would be too much chaos, rioting, and overturning of established orders all over the world. The powerful in the rest of the world would put aside all differences and gang up on the outlaws to restore order.