Just as individual Greeks are losing access to Apple's iCloud, as the Athens staff of Bloomberg News recently discovered, so companies are finding themselves cut off from services critical to their ongoing operations.
The problem demonstrates a hidden risk in today's otherwise efficient vertical disintegration. Taking for granted the easy flow of money across borders, system designers never foresaw a situation in which companies with adequate funds would find that they couldn't pay foreign vendors.
"Greek companies are not able at this moment to pay for hosting (Amazon), storage (Dropbox), email services (MailChimp) and many other services," says Jon Vlachogiannis, a Bay Area entrepreneur, in an email. Without these services, otherwise viable businesses are in trouble.
Vlachogiannis and other expats are stepping up to pay the bills from California, rescuing companies with astonishingly small amounts.
"Absolve Verizon of customer service responsibilities"?
Why would Verizon take that deal? As far as they're concerned, they already aren't particularly responsible for customer service. But they can rake in the fees from their captive customer base.
What NY seems to be asking Verizon is "Pretty please, lay in the last mile of fiber and then step away."
You'll have to seriously sweeten the pot (such as extortionate wholesale service fees) to make it more profitable for Verizon to do this, vice continuing to squeeze its current copper-service victims for sunk-cost mostly-profit revenues. And for companies like Verizon, "less profit" is a non-starter.
HOLY MACRO!