I was involved in copyright litigation. The other side missed almost every deadline and the judge let them get away with it. They also wiped hard drives during discovery and amended their complaint *after* discovery ended. Our attorney said some judges use strict deadlines, others don't. The point is, don't assume deadlines are always strictly enforced. I know from experience that they aren't. You should be able to read the filings on PACER if you really care about the deadline issue. Note that discovery isn't on PACER. (If you use the RECAP Firefox plugin, the filings should be free.)

The way termination fees used to work was that you paid your long distance carrier 10 cents a minute for a long distance phone call. The LD carrier shared that ten cents with the local phone companies on both sides of the call. The shared amount vary but a penny to each side was a common amount. The FCC granted a abnormally high fee to rural telephone companies of about five cents a minute. A call from a big city to the country was split 1 cent to the big city telco, 4 cents to the long distance carrier, and 5 cents to the rural telco. The long distance companies didn't make as much money on a call to or from a rural phone company but the amount of traffic was small.

There was also a termination fee for local calls, but it was much less than a penny. Various companies began to "exploit" the termination fees. The guys with lots of modems were some of the first (e.g. whoever AOL outsourced their modems to). The free conference guys figured out you could make good money as well. Remember that conference call companies charged 25 cents a minute, so it was cheaper to pay 10 cents a minute for a long distance call to a free conference service. If they were efficient, they could even make money at 1 cent per minute, but 5 cents was much better so they located in rural areas.

The large telcos started to change their models for long distance from per-minute to a block of minutes (e.g. 500 minutes for $$ per month). The local telcos mostly took over the long distance business so now the telcos were cutting checks to the free conference guys and not getting anything back. Telcos hate that. So they stopped paying or arbitrarily started paying 50 cents on the dollar. They also lobbied to change the rules. And here we are with the FCC tariff change.

(Universal Service Fees are different. They are one of many taxes on your phone bill. The taxes are used to subsidize the phone bills for the "poor".)

I do not run a free conference service (or free anything), but the death star and friends owe me about $50k and I'm very very small.

No you are wrong, even using the government's "cooked" accounting. Here is the official US Treasury website showing the government debt for each year. Notice it increases every year of the Clinton presidency: http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt_histo4.htm

Yea, I've had "politics" blocked for years and, unfortunately, I see this story on the front page as well.

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I own a small CLEC and today AT&T told me to use dial-up to get a daily usage file from them. Now I have to find a modem that works with Linux and figure out PPP scripts.

And if these multinational companies pay exactly zero in taxes, what is the big advantage to having them "headquartered" here in the first place?

A corporation paying zero taxes is great compared to negative taxes paid by GM, Chrysler, Citi, Amtrak, etc.

Here's a quick course in Constitutional law: They can do whatever they want; the commerce clause says so.

Your numbers are misleading two ways. First, you should use relative amounts (e.g., percentage of GDP) verses absolute dollars. Second, you should use total liabilities verses simple debt. What did the government obligate itself (meaning taxpayers) to spend? Government accounting is fraudulent; too bad voters don't care.

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