The fascinating thing about this invitation to come bribe Rep. Al Wynn (D-MD) is that while AT&T, Comcast, Qwest, and TimeWarner Cable all have PACs, Verizon has a "Good Government Committee." Truly they're on the Orwellian frontier here, the rest of the telecom industry risks being left in the dust.
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It's The Network
14 Jan 2008 10:59 am
Comments (12)
Matthew doesn't know the half of it re "Orwellian" Verizon.
1) Major telecoms have been strongly lobbying Congress to grant them retroactive legal immunity for turning over customer data to the National Security Agency without a warrent. A push in Congress to grant that immunity failed on Nov 13, 2007.
2) Late in the evening of Nov 13, Verizon sent its customers a low-key email notifying them of a change in Verizon's terms of service.
3) If the customer actually followed the link to Verizon's web site, they would see that they grant Verizon retroactive legality immunity if they continue Verizon service past Nov 27, 2007.
4) It , of course, is hard to cancel internet service on such short notice. Plus Verizon has pretty much of a monopoly vis a vis telephone service.
5) The failure in Congress on Nov 13 to NOT grant immunity to the Telecoms was noted in several news articles --
see http://www.miamiherald.com/692/story/300491.html
6) Here's the link to Verizon's Terms of Service change granting Verizon retroactive immunity for illegal wiretapping:
http://netservices.verizon.net/portal/link/main/announcement?linkflag=guestonly_noregion&id=TOS_071120
One motivation for monopoly Verizon to coerce customers into giving them immunity from liability for illegal wiretapping is that Discovery in customers lawsuits keeps digging up more and more unsavory information.
If customers can't sue, they can't discover what Verizon is doing.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_challenges_to_NSA_warrantless_searches_in_the_United_States
Here is the Philly suburbs, there are few options for Internet service other than Verizon DSL. Years ago, I actually used another Internet service provider. That provider went out of business after customers experienced a rash of random outages over several weeks times.
I actually visited the offices of the failing ISP to see what was going one -- and found the employees waiting around for the VERIZON maintanance guy.
Evidently, customers dialed into the ISP's servers but the ISP was connected into the Internet via a high bandwidth VERIZON trunk line. Which kept failing for some mysterious reason in spite of Verizon's heroic efforts. heh heh heh
Fortunately the customers of that failing ISP could switch over to Verizon and use Verizon as their ISP.
heh heh heh
But, hey, the Democrats have outraised the Republicans this cycle. Let's celebrate!
In any event, I assume that Verizon's "Good Governance Committee" refers to good corporate governance, not good national governance.
Go on over to Firedoglake, click on BlueAmerica, and drop $50 into Donna Edwards' bucket.
Evidently, customers dialed into the ISP's servers but the ISP was connected into the Internet via a high bandwidth VERIZON trunk line.
This is true, I believe, for most of the US--whatever your ISP, they're probably completely reliant on infrastructure built and owned by whichever Bell System-legacy-corporation controls the lines for that particular part of the nation.
This seems like a good place to put in my plug for the one-step process that will remove Al Wynn from Congress:
Vote for Donna Edwards in the Democratic Primary.
This has been a public service announcement from your neighbors in Maryland's 4th District.
Perhaps "Orwellian" in the sense of "dating back to the time of George Orwell." Quite a few corporate PACs call themselves "good government committees," and have done so for quite a while.
Interesting that the sphere is up in arms over Al Wynn's corporate-whoring but was silent when Hillary was holding similar events in the thick of the race.
Exactly. Thank you, David.
David & Will,
The 'sphere has been pretty vocal about Hillary's corporate whoring, and Harry Reid's and John Dingell's, too. This isn't exactly a pro-Clinton corner of the world.
Al (troll Al, not Al Wynn) almost seems to be on the right side -- have we crossed into Bizarroworld?
It's true that most so-called "independent" ISPs are in fact connected via "not so independent" phone companies. And of course the big phone companies run the Internet backbone, so in the end everybody is connected to them.
This is why the telecom companies would like to kill Google, because they see Google's alleged plans to drop "data centers in a box" all over the country and then buy up the new wireless bandwidth up for auction as a potential threat to obsolete the phone companies.
I'm not sure that's going to happen, but it would be interesting if it did.
Comments closed January 28, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Interesting that the sphere is up in arms over Al Wynn's corporate-whoring but was silent when Hillary was holding similar events in the thick of the race.
Posted by David Mizner | January 14, 2008 11:14 AM