Visions of Neutrality: Bruce Kushnick

The following are my notes from a talk by Bruce Kushnick at the Freedom2Connect conference on Monday.

Bruce’s e-book, The $200 Billion Broadband Scandal, was the original focus of this blog.

Bruce Kushnick
Teletruth

Customers were overcharged $200  billion for a fiber optic, 45 megabit,  bidirectional 500 channel service that was supposed to be offered to all competitors and ubiquitous throughout the US.

It isn’t their money. They aren’t their networks. We paid for networks that never showed up.

The Bells spend $1 billion with TeleTV and Americast, promsing cable competition, and rewrote the Telecommunications Act to let them into long distqance. They couldn’t build the 45 megabit channels when they cut the deal.

In New Jersey, in 1992, the state legislature passed a law saying they would rewire the sate by 2010 – a 45 megabit network, bidirectional, ubiquitous, equal.

In 2000 Verizon claimed it could do this, to 52% of the state. Presently 75% should be able to get this.

We were lied to.

Why? The mergers. SBC bought Ameritech, then SNET, and closed down everything they were doing. SBC bought PacBell and closed down every fiber optic service.

It was a bait and switch. The couldn’t build the networks, and so they rolled out DSL on the copper wires. The Bells said fiber was the way to go, and DSL was inferior, it would harm the economy because it was based on copper. We have that in writing.

Verizon killed 13 state fiber optic deployments in New England and New York alone.

This was all in state law.

The FCC then changed the definition of broadband to 200 Kbps, which can’t do TV. Then the FCC closed line sharing, ISPs could no longer use networks, it closed
UNE-P, and let the phone companies own the pipes in greenfields, in new fiber builds.

The money was collected, but  the service was never provided. This happened in most states.

Net neutrality is extortion. If customers funded the networks, they’re ours, and we paid for open networks, not closed ones. The FCC law in 2004 closed these networks, but the money collected just in New Jersey was $5 billion.

We paid to have the networks opened. Now the Bells are able to bundle and cross-subsidize. We’re arguing that’s not legal. We paid for open networks.

We should get mad. We should get the money back. Instead of arguing net neutrality, the whole thing is a customer takings. Customers had rights that were taken away. The PSTN (public switched telephone network) should go back to the public. We should take actions that allow us to go and get the money.

Change the laws to get the money back