AT&T's long history of lying: My blog post from 2007 about "ZZZZZZ" and a
CPUC hearing
Below is from a blog post of mine in 2007, when I discussed my very
early confrontation with AT&T that led to a hearing at the California
Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) when I was around 20 years old or
so. It was an early lesson for me, many years ago, about how
duplicitous and lying AT&T could be. Nothing has changed in that
regard. Something to keep in mind with their proposals at the CPUC
currently to effectively abandon vast numbers of California AT&T
subscribers. "Thank you for using AT&T! Now go to Hell!" -L
- - -
July 22, 2007:
Greetings. My first real exposure to how The Phone Company manipulates
information (that is, lies) to further its own ends came when I was
around twenty years old or so, at the height of "Phone Phreaking"
decades ago.
I found myself in a downtown L.A. conference room of the California
Public Utilities Commission, defending the operations of the extremely
popular free telephone entertainment (i.e. jokes and skits) line with
which I was affiliated. (For telephone historians, this was
"ZZZZZZ" -- at the time the last listing in the Los Angeles telephone
directories.)
Two young colleagues and I faced off a similar number of AT&T
representatives, who were attempting to convince the CPUC that "Z" was
an imminent danger to the formidable Bell System, by virtue of "Z"
receiving so many calls that it was supposedly saturating toll and
local switching equipment around the country! AT&T had prepared a
beautiful report explaining their collected data (complete with
colorful graphs, reminiscent of Arlo Guthrie's "twenty-seven 8x10
color glossy photos" from Alice's Restaurant) to drive home their
point.
AT&T apparently assumed that they could easily steamroll a few kids.
They were wrong.
It only took a quick skimming of their report for me to realize that
while their numbers were not unreasonable, their underlying
assumptions and arguments were totally bogus. As I politely pointed
this out, the AT&T reps looked at each other in apparent confusion,
and the CPUC official in attendance seemed to have a grim look on her
face.
The upshot was that she told AT&T that their case was not convincing
and "Z" would not be shut down. There's more to the story but that
doesn't really matter here.
Fast forward some three decades. Thanks to consolidation and collapse
of most effective "last mile" telecom competition, the players look
much the same. AT&T morphed into ... well, "The New AT&T," in much the
same way that "It's not the same old line" General Telephone
eventually mutated into Verizon.
Telecom control is still the name of the game, and whatever needs to
be said, whatever promises can be made that can be ignored later, are
still the modus operandi of choice for the telcos, especially now that
wireless operations are such crucial parts of their spheres.
There is a common thread underlying telco arguments against both
Google's support of Internet Net Neutrality and Google's Spectrum
Auction proposals. That thread is fear -- fear of losing control, fear
of real competition -- and the fear of sliding into gradual oblivion
through a tactical error, much as Western Union made when they
declined the opportunity to buy the basic telephone patents in 1876 at
a budget price.
No fallacy or pressure is too small -- or large -- to be deployed by
the phone companies in this battle. Younger readers will not remember
a time when you couldn't legally buy your own telephones or other
equipment to hook up to the public phone network, and when the
telephone companies actively checked phone lines to determine how many
phones were attached (could this surveillance be defeated? Yes.)
Nor do most people realize today that at one time, AT&T insisted that
a simple privacy device that slipped over a telephone mouthpiece would
cause grave disruption to telephone operations and so must be
banned -- a position the FCC at the time supported (the infamous
"Hush-a-Phone" case, decided against AT&T and the FCC in 1956).
The latest technique is to either state or imply that simply because a
large, powerful company like Google supports a concept like Network
Neutrality or "open access" to spectrum, it must be anti-consumer in
some manner. But in reality, it's the traditional telephone companies
and their positions, especially when considered alongside their sordid
history of failing to live up to agreements, that is the anti-consumer
side.
The Google positions on these matters could of course financially
benefit Google greatly. So what? Both neutrality and open networks
would also be of immense benefits to consumers generally, particularly
if provisions were included to guarantee reasonable access for
innovative, smaller firms as well as established, larger enterprises.
But the telcos are what the telcos always have been, and their basic
playbook hasn't changed since the dawn of first voice and then data
communications. Unfortunately, on the big issues such as we're dealing
with now, they are simply not to be trusted, and their arguments can
only be viewed through the prism of their past inequities.
I'm not an apologist for Google. I simply attempt to understand and
explain these issues the best that I can. But as far as I'm concerned,
even though the phone companies and Google are all major commercial,
profit-making enterprises, I have no difficulty at all in suggesting
that from both consumer and technological reality points of view,
Google has the right approach in these areas, and the phone companies
are, in actuality, indeed still giving us the same old tired and
distorted anti-consumer lines.
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
[email protected] (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
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