AT&T starts offering low-cost DSL (NSFW)

Warning: Clicking on the links in this post will get you fired/divorced. But if you were not expecting that you wouldn’t be here anyhow.

In a fake show of concern for the consumer, FCC did something nice in its act of collectively screwing us all by letting AT&T “ma bell” come back together. A reach-around if you will. They mandated that AT&T must offer DSL service “naked” – without the mandatory phone line and its associated fake taxes – you know, the ones paying off the Spanish-American war of 1898 or the ones paying off the infrastructure investment made by phone companies, something we in business world call cost-of-doing-business.

That’s right, depening on the territory you live in you can get AT&T naked DSL for $23–26 in the midwest and north, below $20 on the west coast but in Florida it’s still $49. If you can cheat the online ordering system and get it for about $20 in Florida. Worth the try!

But at least we won! Eh, no, not so much. You see, they only made them offer it for 30 months after which they can force people back into their bundles. This is the example of your government working for you. They take a huge, anticompetitive company and force it to offer a pricing tier thats far below the market cost, assuring a prompt destruction of any third party providers in the area. After they have destroyed their competitors and fired half their staff in the synergy-optimization benefits, AT&T will go back to the government, cry about how much money it is losing and seek permission to pound the consumer even harder.

So dear friends, this is far less of a reach-around and more of something that only Ms. Brianna Banks will do on contract video. (off-topic: Yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like.)

I hope you have been exhaustively offended by this post and can remember it the next time you feel our country needs a few less lawyers or feel a company has been punished too much. FCC, through this double whammy, has singlehandedly shot us back 20 years in terms of choice and nearly negated the benefits received from the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which was meant to foster competition. Corporations are only motivated by the greed of their shareholders without concern for the public and they deserve every bit of regulatory beatdown sent down by the goverenment.

Unfortunately, government and corporations seem to be getting together and we’re left behind in Brianna’s shoes heels.