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The following statement is in reference to the
Federal Communications Commission's July 27, 2000, en banc hearing in
the matter of the application of America Online, Inc., and Time
Warner, Inc., for transfer of control. It should be attributed to Dr.
Mark N. Cooper, Director of Research of Consumer Federation of
America.
"Unless the FCC provides some guidance from the control tower, consumers are going to be stuck at the gate, forced to pay unnecessarily stiff premiums, and limited in their choices to reach the fast-flying Internet.
"Absent sound FCC policy, the exclusive deals and proprietary barriers to competition that are being imposed on the broadband Internet industry will drive it further down an anti-competitive, anti-consumer path that falls somewhere between the cable TV and airline industry models. With most markets dominated by one or two firms that control the gateways of communications and commerce, it doesn't take a genius to figure out why these industries treat consumers so poorly.
"Now is the time -during review of the proposed AOL/Time Warner merger- for the FCC to do what it must. First, it should follow the direction of the recent decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and guarantee consumers open and non-discriminatory access to the high-speed Internet. Second, it should follow the lead of the Department of Justice and order AOL Time Warner to divest its interest in competing broadband distribution and programming interests."
Dr. Cooper's separate written statement,
delivered on behalf of Consumer Federation of America, Consumers
Union, Media Access Project, and Center for Media Education to the
FCC on July 27, is available online at http://www.consumerfed.org/internetaccess/aoltw_fccstatement270700.pdf.
The full filing made with the FCC is available
at
http://www.consumerfed.org/internetaccess/aoltwfiling270700.pdf.
The Consumer Federation of America (CFA) is a
non-profit association of some 260 pro-consumer groups, with a
combined membership of 50 million. It was founded in 1968 to advance
the consumer interest through advocacy and education.
ON BEHALF OF
CONSUMER FEDERATION OF AMERICA,
CONSUMERS UNION, MEDIA ACCESS PROJECT, AND
THE CENTER FOR MEDIA EDUCATION
BEFORE THE FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS
COMMISSION
EN BANC HEARING IN THE MATTER OF APPLICATION OF AMERICA ONLINE, INC.,
AND TIME WARNER, INC., FOR TRANSFER OF CONTROL
July 27, 2000
Since we petitioned the Commission a few months
ago to deny or substantially restructure the AOL/Time Warner merger,
developments in market structure and patterns of corporate conduct in
the cable TV and broadband Internet industries only reinforce the
strength of our case. Unless the Commission takes decisive action,
the broadband Internet industry will continue to move down an
anti-competitive, anti-consumer path that lies somewhere between the
cable TV model and the airline industry model.
The choke points on the broadband Internet have
been identified: backbone, bit rates, and the boot screen. The sticky
features that lock customers in to proprietary platforms have become
clear: instant messaging, buddy lists, key words, e-mail addresses,
and electronic programming information. The dominant firms continue
to leverage these choke points, while they work out deals that would
dampen competition, to the detriment of the consumer.
Consumers have enjoyed vigorous competition
from hundreds of narrowband Internet service providers. As the
Internet moves into a broadband medium, if the Commission fails to
check the market power of the dominant firms, the competition
consumers enjoy today will become but a faint memory. Independent
firms will be winnowed to a precious few. Those who get access to
consumers will be squeezed by a handful of dominant broadband
platform providers and vertically integrated facility owners.
Multichannel TV markets and broadband Internet markets will continue
to look like airline markets: most will be dominated by one or two
firms that control the gateways to the network, while niche
competition provides at best a modicum of relief in some markets for
some customers.
THE GROWING THREAT TO COMPETITION AND
CONSUMER CHOICE
In its recent filing at the FCC, America Online
(AOL) paints a rosy picture of competition that will flow from its
proposed merger (Letter to Ms. Royce Dickens, July 17, 2000). We see
a completely different landscape. The signs of actual and potential
anticompetitive problems are clear in the emerging market structure,
as described by the Department of Justice, and in the continuing
refusal of dominant firms to provide access to networks or support
communications between customers, as documented in regulatory and
legal proceedings.
The Department of Justice (U.S. Department of
Justice v. AT&T Corp. and MediaOne Group, Inc., Amended
Complaint, May 26, 2000) has determined that the broadband Internet
market is a separate and distinct market from the narrowband Internet
market. Once this obvious economic fact is accepted, the severe
concentration in the broadband market - resulting in a high degree of
market power - and the blatantly anti-competitive effect of the
exclusionary tactics of the dominant broadband firms become apparent.
The Department of Justice determined:
AT&T's ability to affect the success of individual content providers also could be used to confer market power on individual content providers favored by AT&T.
By exploiting its "gatekeeper" position in the residential broadband content market to extract anticompetitive terms and to disfavor certain content providers, AT&T could make it less attractive for content providers to invest in the creation of attractive broadband content thereby reducing the quality and quantity of broadband content in the future.
AT&T could profit from the creation and exercise of such market power either through direct ownership of a favored content provider, or by obtaining payments from favored content providers in exchange for favorable treatment by Excite@Home and Road Runner.
Excite@Home and Road Runner are positioned to become two of the most important providers of aggregation, promotion and distribution of residential broadband content. By virtue of the large number of subscribers to their residential broadband services, both firms will be able to significantly assist or retard the competitive efforts of broadband content providers, by granting or withholding aggregation, promotion, and distribution services or through the prices, terms, and conditions by which such services are provided. Moreover, because of their ownership affiliations and exclusive contracts with many of the largest cable MSOs, it is unlikely that other providers of residential broadband service will be able to enter and attract comparable numbers of subscribers in the near term.
The dispute over AOL's exclusionary practices
in instant messaging continues unabated. A twist of irony has been
added with Excite@Home, whose own business model is built on
exclusion, joining the fray to demand access to AOL's customers
(Letter to Robert Pitofsky and William Kennard, June 7, 2000)
A bedrock principle of our approach to communications has been that users of critical communications functions should be able to communicate with all others, even those who use different service providers… It would have been a disaster for the Internet if e-mail had been held captive to a proprietary technology so that users of one e-mail system could not communicate with e-mail users of a different system or if one company could dictate the terms by which all other companies could use e-mail. Instant messaging must be subject to the same principle.
AOL's would-be cable subsidiary has given the
public and policymakers a brutal lesson in what negotiations look
like when one side has the power to pull the plug. When Time Warner
put Disney/ABC off the air at the start of a sweeps period, it
underscored the need for "open access" and "open protocols." As
convergence leads to the emergence of interactive TV (ITV) as the
killer application of the residential, broadband, multimedia Internet
our concerns grow over the ability to use control over cable-based
broadband Internet service to determine how the next generation of
broadband Internet services gets to the consumer and which companies
can provide ITV most effectively. If wire owners that give their own
programming an edge stand to gain from that preference, they will
have an advantage in competing for viewers' attention. Fair
competition for eyeballs will be impossible.
The Commission needs to address the question of
how to preserve open access and open protocols, which are the
cornerstones of the Internet. It is quite clear that as the
commercial value of the Internet grows, these huge communications
corporations are more than willing to destroy its fundamental
openness to further their private economic interests. Competition and
open communications would suffer a disastrous setback, if Internet
service providers, by virtue of proprietary platforms, or cable
companies, by virtue of exclusionary practices, can dictate the terms
by which independent Internet service providers can provide
communications functions or provide access to cable modem facilities
for their customers.
Because of the powerful interest these
companies have in maintaining exclusionary, proprietary leverage,
reliance on commercial negotiations to establish nondiscriminatory
access continues to yield virtually no progress. Commercial
negotiations will inevitably fail to produce meaningful
nondiscriminatory access. By flip-flopping on the principle of open
access, AOL demonstrated its intention to use that leverage to its
advantage. The frailty of voluntary open access was made clear when
AOL was unwilling to allow its promises to be turned into
obligations, as the City of Los Angeles tried to do. Exclusionary
contracts are still in place. Virtually no details of negotiated
commercial access have been provided, not to mention agreed to. The
dominant cable modem firms continue to resist having their commercial
promises turned into enforceable obligations. Preferential contracts
have been extended far out into the future in some cases.
Federal and state regulators no longer have to
abide the anticompetitive, exclusionary tactics of cable TV firms.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has concluded that
the use of facilities to transmit interactive communications for
broadband Internet access is a telecommunications service.
Among its broad reforms, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 enacted a competitive principle embodied by the dual duties of nondiscrimination and interconnection... Together, these provisions mandate a network architecture that prioritizes consumer choice, demonstrated by vigorous competition among telecommunications carriers. As applied to the Internet, Portland calls it "open access," while AT&T dysphemizes it as "forced access." Under the Communications Act, this principle of telecommunications common carriage governs cable broadband as it does other means of Internet transmission such as telephone service and DSL, "regardless of the facilities used."
In its most recent filing at the Commission,
Time Warner failed to comply with its statutory duties to provide
nondiscriminatory access to cable modem service providers. Time
Warner continues to exploit its control over essential cable
modem-related inputs, not only to prevent advanced services
competition, but also to perpetuate its virtual monopoly over the
market for multichannel video services.
Both the Department of Justice and the Ninth
Circuit draw a sharp and important distinction between the content of
information transported over the communications network and the
conduit through which that information flows. As the Ninth Circuit
put it:
Like other ISPs, @Home consists of two elements: a pipeline (cable broadband instead of telephone lines), and the Internet service transmitted through that pipeline. However, unlike other ISPs, @Home controls all of the transmission facilities between its subscribers and the Internet. To the extent @Home is a conventional ISP, its activities are one of an information service. However, to the extent that @Home provides its subscribers Internet transmission over its cable broadband facility, it is providing a telecommunications service as defined in the Communications Act.
The Ninth Circuit also emphasized the
fundamental compatibility between Internet principles of openness and
the principles of telecommunications common carriage that it
concluded must be applied to cable modem services.
The Internet's protocols themselves manifest a related principle called "end-to-end": control lies at the ends of the network where the users are, leaving a simple network that is neutral with respect to the data it transmits, like any common carrier. On this role of the Internet, the codes of the legislator and the programmer agree.
THE GROWING COST OF INACTION
Almost two years have passed since we first
asked the Commission to take action to ensure open access over cable
wires. Since then, the cable industry has succeeded in delaying
competition for video programming by banning the streaming of video.
Millions of consumers already have been denied a choice of broadband
Internet service providers. Had the Commission ordered open access
two years ago, the network architecture would already be far
friendlier to competition and support many more Internet service
providers. We would be done with the trials and instead be working on
providing access.
The Commission is confronted with a highly
concentrated market for residential broadband service in which cable
modem facility owners dominate, cable TV firms have exhibited
repeated patterns of exclusionary and anticompetitive behavior, and
barriers to communications driven by private interests are
developing. The Commission can and should prevent this
anticompetitive and anti-consumer industry structure from taking
hold. At the very least, the Commission should undertake the
following steps:
· The Commission should prevent any cross ownership and sweetheart deals between the dominant firms to minimize their opportunity to collude and to maximize the rivalry between their interests.
· Although cross technology competition has failed to discipline market power in the communications industries in the past, to maximize the hope for future cross-technology competition, the Commission should forbid firms from owning potentially competing technologies.
· To prevent vertically integrated service providers from leveraging their market power over facilities into the content market, the Commission should impose a clear legal obligation to provide open access.
· Proprietary platforms should not be allowed to wall consumers off from competition, or to destroy the communications functions of interactive communications networks.
The Commission now has before it an opportunity
to ensure that consumer interests in the broadband Internet are
protected. While Commission rules take years to develop, and
antitrust cases can take decades to resolve, merger conditions can
immediately be imposed and implemented. The Commission will recall,
for example, that it imposed on SBC and Bell Atlantic open access
conditions on DSL service when approving their recent mergers. In
light of the Ninth Circuit ruling, now is the time for the Commission
to impose a similar condition on AOL Time Warner.
In the Matter of ) ) Docket CS 00-30, Application of America Online, Inc.
and Time )
)
Warner, Inc. for Transfer of Control
)
On Behalf of
CONSUMERS UNION
CONSUMER FEDERATION OF AMERICA
MEDIA ACCESS PROJECT
and
THE CENTER FOR MEDIA EDUCATION
Before the
EN BANC HEARING
July 27, 2000
FUNDAMENTAL CONCERNS ABOUT THE AOL/TIME
WARNER MERGER
Several months ago the Consumer Federation of America, Consumers Unions, Media Access Project and the Center for Media Education (Consumer Petitioners), petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (the Commission) to deny or substantially restructure the AOL/Time Warner merger.(1) Outlining our deep concern about the proposed AOL/Time Warner Merger, Consumer Petitioners concluded that the merger is not in the public interest and should be rejected unless the Commission
Developments in the industry and legal rulings,
as well as AOL/Time Warner's wholly inadequate responses to
information requests, since we reached those conclusions have only
strengthened our case. Rather than repeat the lengthy analysis
presented to the Commission earlier, in our comments today we focus
on the market structure and corporate conduct patterns that have
developed in the past several months that reinforce the need for the
Commission to substantially restructure or block this merger.
THE GROWING THREAT TO COMPETITION AND CONSUMER CHOICE
In its recent filing at the Commission, America
Online (AOL) paints a rosy picture of competition that will flow from
its proposed merger.(2)
We see a completely different landscape. The signs of actual and
potential anticompetitive problems are clear in the emerging market
structure, as described by the Department of Justice, and in the
continuing refusal of dominant firms to provide access to networks or
support communications between customers, as documented in regulatory
and legal proceedings.
(1) The Department of Justice has determined
that the broadband Internet market is a separate and distinct market
from the narrowband Internet market.
For providers of broadband content, i.e., content that either requires broadband speeds or is much superior when viewed at broadband speeds, links that will attract more broadband customers, and only broadband customers, are more valuable than links that will be seen predominantly by narrowband users who will not access broadband content. Therefore, links that will be viewed by the general mass of Internet users - a substantial majority of which today are narrowband users - are not a good substitute for links that will be widely and exclusively viewed by broadband users.
In addition, content providers seek network services such as caching that will facilitate the distribution of their data so as to enhance the quality and accessibility of their content. Caching stores a content provider's content at various locations throughout the country, closer to end users, thereby improving speed and performance. This is a particularly important service for broadband content providers who must rely on the rapid delivery of large quantities of data in order to provide the most attractive content…
The aggregation and promotion of content, and the efficient physical distribution of content, are valuable services to content providers that heavily influence their success or failure in the content market. Content providers typically contract on a nationwide basis with firms that provider such services. The relevant geographic market for the aggregation, promotion and distribution of broadband content is the United States.(3)
Once this obvious economic fact is accepted,
the severe concentration in the broadband market - resulting in a
high degree of market power - and the blatantly anticompetitive
effect of the exclusionary tactics of the dominant broadband firms
become apparent.
Through its control of Excite@Home and its substantial influence or control of Road runner, AT&T would substantially increase its leverage in dealing with broadband content providers, enabling it to extract more favorable terms for such service. AT&T's ability to affect the success of individual content providers also could be used to confer market power on individual content providers favored by AT&T.
By exploiting its "gatekeeper" position in the residential broadband content market to extract anticompetitive terms and to disfavor certain content providers, AT&T could make it less attractive for content providers to invest in the creation of attractive broadband content thereby reducing the quality and quantity of broadband content in the future.
Excite@Home and Road Runner are positioned to become two of the most important providers of aggregation, promotion and distribution of residential broadband content. By virtue of the large number of subscribers to their residential broadband services, both firms will be able to significantly assist or retard the competitive efforts of broadband content providers, by granting or withholding aggregation, promotion, and distribution services or through the prices, terms, and conditions by which such services are provided. Moreover, because of their ownership affiliations and exclusive contracts with many of the largest cable MSOs, it is unlikely that other providers of residential broadband service will be able to enter and attract comparable numbers of subscribers in the near term.
AT&T could profit from the creation and exercise of such market power either through direct ownership of a favored content provider, or by obtaining payments from favored content providers in exchange for favorable treatment by Excite@Home and Road Runner. (4)
(2) The dispute over AOL's exclusionary
practices in instant messaging has been simmering for about a year
and continues unabated. A twist of irony has been added with
Excite@Home, whose own business model is built on exclusion, joining
the fray to demand access to AOL's
customers.(5)
A bedrock principle of our approach to communications has been that users of critical communications functions should be able to communicate with all others, even those who use different service providers… It would have been a disaster for the Internet if e-mail had been held captive to a proprietary technology so that users of one e-mail system could not communicate with e-mail users of a different system or if one company could dictate the terms by which all other companies could use e-mail. Instant messaging must be subject to the same principle.
(3) AOL's would-be cable subsidiary has given
the public and policymakers a brutal lesson in what negotiations look
like when one side has the power to pull the plug. When Time Warner
put Disney/ABC off the air at the start of a sweeps period, it
underscored the need for "open access" and "open protocols." As
convergence leads to the emergence of interactive TV (ITV) as the
killer application of the residential, broadband, multimedia
Internet, concerns grow over the ability of vertically integrated
network owners to use control over cable-based broadband Internet
service to determine how the next generation of broadband Internet
services gets to the consumer and which companies can provide ITV
most effectively. If wire owners that give their own programming an
edge stand to gain from that preference, they will have an advantage
in competing for viewers' attention. Fair competition for eyeballs
will be impossible.
The Commission needs to address the question of
how to preserve open access and open protocols, which are the
cornerstones of the Internet. It is quite clear that as the
commercial value of the Internet grows, these huge communications
corporations are more than willing to destroy its fundamental
openness to further their private economic interests. Competition
and open communications would suffer a disastrous setback, if
Internet service providers, by virtue of proprietary platforms, or
cable companies, by virtue of exclusionary practices, can dictate the
terms by which independent Internet service providers can provide
communications functions or provide access to cable modem facilities
for their customers.
(4) Because of the powerful interest these
companies have in maintaining exclusionary, proprietary leverage,
reliance on commercial negotiations to establish open access
continues to yield virtually no progress. The overwhelming leverage
enjoyed by the dominant firms will prevent commercial negotiations
from producing meaningful nondiscriminatory access. By flip-flopping
on the principle of open access, AOL demonstrated its intention to
use that leverage to its advantage. The frailty of voluntary open
access was made clear when AOL was unwilling to allow its promises to
be turned into obligations, as the City of Los Angeles tried to
do.(6)
Exclusionary contracts are still in place. Virtually no details of
negotiated commercial access have been provided, not to mention
agreed to. The dominant cable modem firms continue to resist having
their commercial promises turned into enforceable obligations.
Preferential contracts have been extended far out into the future in
some cases.
(5) Federal and state regulators no longer have
to abide the anticompetitive, exclusionary tactics of cable TV firms.
The Ninth Circuit Appeals Court has concluded that the use of
facilities to transmit interactive communications for broadband
Internet access is a telecommunications service.
(7)
Among its broad reforms, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 enacted a competitive principle embodied by the dual duties of nondiscrimination and interconnection... Together, these provisions mandate a network architecture that prioritizes consumer choice, demonstrated by vigorous competition among telecommunications carriers. As applied to the Internet, Portland calls it "open access," while AT&T dysphemizes it as "forced access." Under the Communications Act, this principle of telecommunications common carriage governs cable broadband as it does other means of Internet transmission such as telephone service and DSL, "regardless of the facilities used."
In its most recent filing at the Commission,
Time Warner failed to comply with its statutory duties to provide
nondiscriminatory access to cable modem service providers. Time
Warner continues to exploit its control over essential cable
modem-related inputs, not only to prevent advanced services
competition, but also to perpetuate its virtual monopoly over the
market for multichannel video services. (8)
(6) Both the Department of Justice and the
Ninth Circuit decision draws a sharp and important distinction
between the content of information transported over the
communications network and the conduit through which that information
flows. The Ninth Circuit makes clear that the Commission has the
authority to prevent this abuse by making a clear distinction between
content and conduit.
Like other ISPs, @Home consists of two elements: a pipeline (cable broadband instead of telephone lines), and the Internet service transmitted through that pipeline. However, unlike other ISPs, @Home controls all of the transmission facilities between its subscribers and the Internet. To the extent @Home is a conventional ISP, its activities are one of an information service. However, to the extent that @Home provides its subscribers Internet transmission over its cable broadband facility, it is providing a telecommunications service as defined in the Communications Act.
The Ninth Circuit also concluded that the
principles underlying the development of the Internet were consistent
with the principle that conduit should be required to be open.
The Internet's protocols themselves manifest a
related principle called "end-to-end": control lies at the ends of
the network where the users are, leaving a simple network that is
neutral with respect to the data it transmits, like any common
carrier. On this role of the Internet, the codes of the legislator
and the programmer agree.
It is clear that rights to communications and
commerce on the broadband Internet cannot be determined by the
economic interests of private corporations. Open access cannot rely
on promises by huge, vertically integrated facilities owners to
behave properly, even if those promises are motivated by powerful
market incentives. In light of these rulings, these rights need not
rely on private economic interest; open, nondiscriminatory access can
and must be a right, under the Communications Act.
THE GROWING COST OF INACTION
Almost two years have passed since we first
asked the Commission to take action to ensure open access over cable
wires. The cable industry has succeeded in delaying competition for
video programming for over two years with its ban on the streaming of
video. Millions of consumers have already been denied a choice of
broadband Internet service providers. Had the Commission ordered
open access two years ago, the network architecture would already be
far more friendly to competition and support many more Internet
service providers. We would be done with the trials and working on
providing access.
The costs of failing to act now are even larger
because concentration and convergence have shrunk the ranks of the
potential competitors to a very few. The choke points on the
broadband Internet have been identified - backbone, bit rates, and
the boot screen. The sticky features in proprietary platforms that
lock customers in have become clear - instant messaging, buddy lists,
key words, e-mail addresses, electronic programming information. The
dominant firms continue to leverage their hold on these choke points,
while they work out deals to prevent competition from eroding their
economic rents.
As the Internet moves into a broadband medium,
if the Commission fails to check the market power of the dominant
firms, the competition consumers enjoy today will become but a faint
memory. Independent firms will be winnowed to a precious few. Those
who get access to consumers will be squeezed by a handful of dominant
broadband platform providers and vertically integrated facility
owners. The concentration and business practices that are developing
in the broadband Internet industry are guiding it down a path that
leads to an industry structure that lies somewhere between the cable
TV model and the airline industry model. Most markets are dominated
by one or two firms that control the gateways to the network, while
niche competition provides at best a modicum of relief in some
markets for some customers. Without immediate measures to ensure
open, nondiscriminatory access and interoperability, the broadband
internet will take on the worst anticonsumer and anticompetitive
aspects of the cable TV and airline industries.
AN IMMEDIATE REMEDY
Thus, the Commission is confronted with a
highly concentrated market for residential broadband service in which
cable modem facility owners dominate, cable TV firms have exhibited
repeated patterns of exclusionary and anticompetitive behavior, and
barriers to communications driven by private interests are
developing. The Commission can and should prevent this
anticompetitive and anti-consumer industry structure from taking
hold.
Delaying these requirements and trying to fix
the problem after the fact imposes enormous costs on the public.
Waiting for an 80 percent market share in a three million customer
market to turn into a 70 percent market share in a 10 million
customer market before the Commission acts does not solve the
problem, it only imposes the cost of anticompetitive conduct on seven
million more consumers. Commission rules take years to develop,
antitrust cases take decades. On the other hand, merger conditions
go into effect immediately. The Commission imposed open access to
DSL service on SBC and Bell Atlantic as a condition of its merger
with Ameritech.(9)
In light of the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court ruling, it should
impost a similar condition on AOL Time Warner. Now is the time to
act.
Finally, we must register our vehement
objection to the procedures the Com-mission has employed in
administering this and other recent merger applications.
(10) In
this case, as in all recent major merger proceedings, it has ignored
the position recommended by the Federal Communications Bar
As-soci-ation in scrapping procedural rules designed to insure press
scrutiny and to assure fairness. Instead, it has substituted
so-called "per-mit but disclose" rules designed for rulemakings, but
which are utterly inadequate to protect the public in adjudicatory
cases. In the ATT/MediaOne merger, this al-lowed the applicants to
have scores of unannounced closed-door meetings with FCC members and
staff, the details of which have been kept secret from the -press
and the public. This practice inherently benefits ap-plicants, who
can negotiate the terms of their merger in private, and cripples
citizens and consumers, who can-not rebut arguments they have not
heard.(11)
_______
Footnotes:
(1) "Petition to Deny of
Consumers Union, Consumer Federation of America, Media Access Project
and the Center for Media Education," In the Matter of Application of
America Online, Inc. and Time Warner, Inc. for Transfer of Control,
Federal Communications Commission, Docket CS 00-30, April 26,
2000.
(2) Letter to Ms. Royce Dickens,
July 17, 2000
(3) U.S. Department of Justice v.
AT&T Corp. and MediaOne Group, Inc., Amended Complaint, May 26,
2000.
(4) U.S. Department of Justice v.
AT&T Corp. and MediaOne Group, Inc., Amended Complaint, May 26,
2000.
(5) Letter to Robert Pitofsky and
William Kennard, dated June 7, 2000.
(6) "L.A. Grants AOL Cable Rights
After Heated Debate," Los AngelesTimes, April 29, 2000.
(7) AT&T v. City of Portland,
Case No. 99-35609, Decided June 22, 2000.
(8) This paraphrases AT&T's
complaint about SBC in Texas, a state in which AT&T has ownership
interests in over 2 million cable subscribers, which it operates on a
closed, discriminatory basis, Comments Of AT&T Corp. in
Opposition to SBC's Section 271 Application for Texas, CC Docket No.
00-44, January 3, 2000.
Today, SWBT is exploiting its control over essential xDSL-related inputs, not only to prevent advanced services competition from AT&T and others, but also to perpetuate its virtual monopoly over the market for local voice services…
SWBT has not, in fact, complied with its statutory duties to provide nondiscriminatory access to xDSL-capable loops.
FCC Docket No. 99-279, October 8, 1999; Docket No. 00-221, July 19, 2000.
(10) The Commission has responded
with alacrity to charges that it moves too slowing in acting on
mer--ger applications. By contrast, once it acts upon merger cases,
it is callously unresponsive to consumers' com-plaints that it
ignores much less complex petitions for reconsideration of those
decisions. Similarly, it has now been more than seven months since
the filing of reconsideration petitions of the Commission's cable
horizontal ownership rules. This inaction unfairly denies CFA and
its colleagues the right to pursue judicial review.
(11) Consumers Union, CFA and Media
Access Project have sought reconsideration of the AT&T/ Me-diaOne
decision. They have also filed a complaint against AT&T for
failing to disclose the con-tents of one such meeting. Their two
month-old request asking the General Counsel to issue a ruling on
these abuses remains unanswered
