Qwest is telling us that it wants special new rules to allow it to provide competitive cable television service. But what the company is not telling us is that it doesn’t want to serve most of our neighborhoods – not unless, of course, you live in the most elite areas.
That’s right. Qwest and its sister Bell telephone monopolies – SBC, Verizon and BellSouth – are seeking exemptions from time-honored civil rights laws that require companies providing cable services to serve all neighborhoods in their service area. The telephone companies – whose networks were built with more than a century of government subsidies and handouts – now want our local lawmakers to bless a business plan that will largely exclude African-American, Hispanic and working-class communities from the latest 21st century advanced broadband services.
After Qwest’s history of past service problems and financial woes, you would think it would think twice before disenfranchising consumers.
The antidiscrimination requirement can be found in the 1984 and 1992 Cable Acts, which require that all telecom companies which provide television service serve the entire communities in which they operate.
If anything, Congress should have applied the antidiscrimination provisions to any carrier for any service, regardless of whether they provide cable television service or not. But instead, the mega-telephone companies are arguing that the requirement of making broadband service to all is far too inconvenient and discourages their broadband investments.
The business plan that the telephone companies want Congress to ratify is dubious. But don’t just take my word for it. Qwest admits in its own policy position that local authorities “must not include a mandated build-out” of their fiber optic networks – the same rules that spurred cable to offer its most advanced services to traditionally underserved communities. And in the company’s pitch to the Greater Metro Telecommunications Consortium, which represents 30 local Denver communities, the company has balked at any build-out requirement that would prevent many neighborhoods from becoming second-class citizens.
The other Bell monopolies are no different.
In seeking to make Wall Street investors salivate, SBC executives – announcing “Project Lightspeed,” its next-generation broadband network – said the company would target 90 percent of its “high value” customers but only 5 percent of “low value” customers. In a heated congressional hearing, Massachusetts congressman Ed Markey, the leading Democrat on telecommunications, accused the company of offering “‘lightspeed’ for the well-off and ‘snail speed’ for everyone else.”
Verizon has a similarly not-so-secret agenda. In New Jersey, for instance, it has committed to serving only 102 of 526 communities, bypassing nearly every predominantly African-American and Hispanic community in the state.
And Verizon’s plan in the Washington, D.C., metro area shows that the inner city and lower- and middle-income areas are completely ignored.
Unlike any other major telecom industry, the telephone companies are the beneficiaries of vast amounts of public welfare, having had government subsidies and government guarantees of profits paid for by taxpayers.
This notwithstanding, the Bells have been able to kill competition in the local telephone industry, which saved consumers and small businesses more than $16 billion a year.
Now they are buying up all their competitors. Recent reports by the Yankee Group and others show that the telephone industry is increasingly monopolistic and unaccountable to the rules of marketplace competition.
Now, the telephone monopolies have the gall to say they need Congress to end antidiscrimination laws so that they can “compete” against satellite and cable providers by cherry picking only the wealthiest communities. They even argue with a straight face that such cherry picking is not redlining because others are serving African-American, Hispanic, middle-income and lower-income communities.
The truth is that here in Denver and elsewhere, there are no restrictions to the telephone companies competing on equal footing against satellite and cable television carriers.
Congress granted them authority to compete for television service in 1996, but they’ve been sitting on the sidelines waiting for congressional authority to discriminate in their rollout of service.
In the few places in California, Virginia, Texas and Florida where they have applied for permission from local governments to offer service, they’ve received it with no fanfare.
That’s why I have joined the leaders of the Urban League of Metro Denver, the Denver Chapter of the NAACP and other civil rights leaders in a letter to Congress opposing Bell-sponsored legislation that would “drive a deep wedge into the digital divide and coronate a 19th century view of telecommunications.”
What really motivates the Bells is an idea that they can pick and choose which communities get competition in broadband services and which don’t. And that is not competition. It’s a monopolist playing emperor.
The Rev. Patrick L. Demmer is the political vice president of the Greater Metro Denver Ministerial Alliance and senior pastor at Graham Memorial Community Church.
