SBC woes

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Wed, Aug 02, 2006 at 04:45:35PM -0400, Fairlight wrote:
> > This may have been a mistake, since the *reason* AT&T was ripe to be
> > bought in the first place was that the mistakes made by McCaw Cellular,
> > to whom they licensed the AT&T Wireless tag "broke their brand". Or so
> > I understand it to be widely thought in those circles.
> 
> Okay, but still--this is -so- wrong at the "regulatory" level.  I quote
> that word, as there doesn't seem to be much regulation actually
> transpiring.

The government are mostly Republicans; Big Businesses are good because
they're good for larger campaign donations.

> You have SBC and BellSouth, both of them Baby Bell's, reuniting with AT&T.
> Worse, Cingular Wireless was a joint SBC/BellSouth company.  Then AT&T
> sold their wireless off -to Cingular-.  SBC and AT&T are now together,
> and if they manage to acquire BellSouth, then as far as I can tell from
> the casual public history of it, Cingular will -also- be in with the New
> and Improved[?!?!] AT&T.  Voila, they just reacquired their wireless.

Yup.

> Oh, let's not forget that AT&T was dropping parts of its LD service as part
> of its strategy, yet at least BellSouth is offering full long distance
> service to its customers, so once again AT&T would be back in the LD market
> unless BellSouth drops that, which I highly doubt given the amount they've
> poured into getting it going.

Yup.

> So that's 2 Baby Bells and 2 wireless providers, as well as (for most
> intents and purposes) 2 LD carriers--all back under one roof with the
> original monopolistic parent.  I dunno what SBC does as far as LD, but it
> could be 3 for all I know.

Pretty much.

> I mean, has anti-monopoly even -glanced- at this deal?  The whole thing
> positively reeks of ClearChannel-type rubberstamping.

You bet.

Cheers,
-- jr 'Where's the outrage?  Over there, in the corner, in a box' a
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
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