Verizon Knows You're A Sucker: Takes Taxpayer Subsidies For Broadband, Doesn't Deliver, Lobbies To Drop Requirements

from the haven't-we-heard-this-story-before? dept

Ten years ago (!?!) we wrote about how Verizon conned Pennsylvania taxpayers out of billions of dollars. Verizon predecessor Bell Atlantic had cut a deal with the state to wire up every home in the state with symmetrical fiber. That didn't happen. And while Verizon's former CEO Ivan Seidenberg did, in fact, make a big bet on fiber with FiOS, Wall Street hated it and kept punishing the company for daring to do something so stupid as investing in the future. This is a quarter-to-quarter world, and spending on capital improvements that would bulk up the entire economy over the long haul is not a bet that Wall Street folks want to make, since it doesn't pay off in a few months. So, it was no surprise that once Seidenberg was out of the picture, it basically dropped all plans to expand FiOS -- and then started looking to push its DSL users to cable providers, so it could focus on the wireless business instead.

A few months ago, we wrote about the same basic story happening in New York City. Verizon made a deal with the city to get all sorts of subsidies and benefits, in exchange for wiring up the entire city with FiOS. That didn't happen. Verizon weasled out of the deal by saying the legalese in the contract didn't actually mean that every home had to get fiber, but just that they had to "pass all households." As in look outside and wave at all that broadbandy goodness passing you by without stopping.

The latest is that Verizon has been able to wiggle out of similar promises in New Jersey. The New Jersey promise was just like the Pennsylvania one, coming back in the early 90s with a promise to wire up the entire state with symmetrical fiber by 2010. Stop me if you've heard this before: that didn't happen. Instead, Verizon flooded the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities with bogus astroturf comments, which it pushed its own employees to send, arguing that the NJBPU should drop that fiber requirement -- and the NJBPU dutifully complied, ridiculously claiming that Verizon's limited, capped, expensive slow wireless LTE service (which comes nowhere near the fiber promises it made) qualifies for meeting the contract terms.

The NJBPU claims that this "settlement," which doesn't appear to involve Verizon paying back any of the rebates, subsidies or fees it received, is a good thing since it will "avoid what could have been years of litigation over enforcement of Verizon's broadband agreement." In other words, Verizon gets to take your money, deliver not very much, and keep it all, because, gee, it would be a real pain to take them to court.

Remember all this as we continue to discuss this new "anti-net neutrality" offering today. Because the telcos have a long history of insisting that if you just give them the regulatory regime they want (which always involves giving them ways to get a lot more money), then they'll deliver the kind of broadband found throughout the rest of the world. Then, they never deliver. Though, they do keep the money.

Filed Under: broadband, fiber, new jersey, njbpu, promises
Companies: verizon

After 20 Years, It's Clear NAFTA Has Failed To Deliver Promised Benefits; So Why Trust TPP, TTIP Will Be Better?

from the learning-from-the-past dept

Both TPP and TAFTA/TTIP are based on the premise that by boosting trade and investment, general prosperity will increase too. And yet, despite the huge scale of the plans, and their major potential knock-on effects on the lives of billions of people, precious little evidence has been offered to justify that basic assumption. To its credit, the European Commission has at least produced a report (pdf) on the possible gains. But as I've analyzed elsewhere, the most optimistic outcome is only tangentially about increased trade, and requires a harmonization of two fundamentally incompatible regulatory systems through massive deregulation on both sides of the Atlantic. In any case, the much-quoted figures are simply the output of econometric models, which may or may not be valid, and require extrapolation to the rather distant 2027, by which time the world could be a very different place.

Given the difficulty of saying anything definite about the future, it makes sense to look back at how past trade agreements have actually worked out for those involved. One of the most important, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has been operational for 20 years, and so offers us a wealth of hard facts. Public Citizen has just released an excellent analysis of what happened (pdf). As it points out:

NAFTA was fundamentally different than past trade agreements in that it was only partially about trade. Indeed, it shattered the boundaries of past U.S. trade pacts, which had focused narrowly on cutting tariffs and easing quotas. In contrast, NAFTA created new privileges and protections for foreign investors that incentivized the offshoring of investment and jobs by eliminating many of the risks normally associated with moving production to low-wage countries. NAFTA allowed foreign investors to directly challenge before foreign tribunals domestic policies and actions, demanding government compensation for policies that they claimed undermined their expected future profits. NAFTA also contained chapters that required the three countries to limit regulation of services, such as trucking and banking; extend medicine patent monopolies; limit food and product safety standards and border inspection; and waive domestic procurement preferences, such as Buy American.

This makes NAFTA the clear model for TPP and TAFTA, both of which hand enormous power to corporates, at the expense of the public and governments.

In 1993, NAFTA was sold to the U.S. public with grand promises. NAFTA would create hundreds of thousands of good jobs here -- 170,000 per year according the Peterson Institute for International Economics. U.S. farmers would export their way to wealth. NAFTA would bring Mexico to a first-world level of economic prosperity and stability, providing new economic opportunities there that would reduce immigration to the United States. Environmental standards would improve.

Techdirt has already discussed how NAFTA has proved disastrous for the US in basic financial terms; here we'll look at some of the other effects, not just in the US, but for Mexico too.

NAFTA has contributed to downward pressure on U.S. wages and growing income inequality. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, two out of every three displaced manufacturing workers who were rehired in 2012 experienced a wage reduction, most of them taking a pay cut of greater than 20 percent.

…

Despite a 188 percent rise in food imports from Canada and Mexico under NAFTA, the average nominal price of food in the United States has jumped 65 percent since the deal went into effect.

…

The reductions in consumer goods prices that have materialized have not been sufficient to offset the losses to wages under NAFTA. U.S. workers without college degrees (63 percent of the workforce) have likely lost an amount equal to 12.2 percent of their wages under NAFTA-style trade even after accounting for the benefits of cheaper goods.

Taken together, these facts represent the reality for much of the US public: wages have fallen, the cost of food has risen, and even though consumer good prices have dropped, overall US workers are worse off than they were before NAFTA came into force. People have lost out in non-monetary ways, too:

Scores of NAFTA countries' environmental and health laws have been challenged in foreign tribunals through the controversial investor-state system. More than $360 million in compensation to investors has been extracted from NAFTA governments via "investor-state" tribunal challenges against toxics bans, land-use rules, water and forestry policies and more. More than $12.4 billion are currently pending in such claims.

NAFTA has been the test-bed for corporations to use investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) to resist or even undo improvements in health and environmental laws that reduce their profits. Even the European Commission, a big fan of corporate sovereignty, has been forced to recognize that ISDS is a danger to the public for this reason. In many ways, Mexico has fared even worse than the US under NAFTA:

The export of subsidized U.S. corn did increase under NAFTA, destroying the livelihoods of more than one million Mexican campesino farmers and about 1.4 million additional Mexican workers whose livelihoods depended on agriculture.

The desperate migration of those displaced from Mexico's rural economy pushed down wages in Mexico's border maquiladora factory zone and contributed to a doubling of Mexican immigration to the United States following NAFTA's implementation.

That last point is important: one of the selling points of NAFTA was that it would help stem the flood of Mexican migrants into the US. As the Public Citizen document reports:

Then-Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari claimed NAFTA would reduce the flow of migrants from Mexico into the United States, saying: "Mexico prefers to export its products rather than its people." Salinas infamously added that the U.S. decision over NAFTA was a choice between "accepting Mexican tomatoes or Mexican migrants that will harvest them in the United States."

As in the US, overall, Mexicans have lost out under NAFTA:

Real wages in Mexico have fallen significantly below pre-NAFTA levels as price increases for basic consumer goods have exceeded wage increases. A minimum wage earner in Mexico today can buy 38 percent fewer consumer goods as on the day that NAFTA took effect.

Public Citizen has performed an invaluable service by pulling together the figures for NAFTA in this rigorous, fully-referenced document. That's not least because the TPP negotiations are at a critical point, with President Obama desperate to obtain Fast Track trade authority that will allow him and his negotiators to push through TPP (and TAFTA/TTIP) with no real Congressional scrutiny and a simple yes/no vote at the end. As Public Citizen points out:

the administration and corporate proponents of the TPP will have difficulty getting the controversial deal through Congress. Twenty years of NAFTA's damage has contributed to a groundswell of TPP opposition among the U.S. public and policymakers. In November 2013, a bipartisan group of 178 members of the U.S. House of Representatives stated their early opposition to any attempt to Fast Track the TPP through Congress, while other members expressed similar concerns about the TPP and the Fast Track trade authority scheme.

Congressional rejection of the TPP stands to intensify as the 20th anniversary of NAFTA provides a fresh reminder of the damage that such past pacts have wrought. It was the initial outcomes of NAFTA that sank previous attempts at massive NAFTA expansions, such as the Free Trade Areas of the Americas and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) FTA.

NAFTA's two-decade legacy of tumult and hardship for millions of people in North America could similarly hasten the downfall of the attempt to expand the NAFTA model via Fast Track and the TPP. If so, it would constitute a unique benefit of an otherwise damaging deal.

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Filed Under: benefits, nafta, promises

Decades Of Failed Promises From Verizon: It Promises Fiber To Get Tax Breaks... Then Never Delivers

from the this-again? dept

A decade ago, we wrote about how Verizon had made an agreement in Pennsylvania in 1994 that it would wire up the state with fiber optic cables to every home in exchange for tax breaks equalling $2.1 billion. In exchange for such a massive tax break, Verizon promised that all homes and businesses would have access to 45Mbps symmetrical fiber by 2015. By 2004, the deal was that 50% of all homes were supposed to have that. In reality, 0% did, and some people started asking for their money back. That never happened, and it appeared that Verizon learned a valuable lesson: it can flat out lie to governments, promise 100% fiber coverage in exchange for subsidies, then not deliver, and no one will do a damn thing about it.

Because here we are about a decade later, and basically the same damn thing has happened in New York City. At least this time, Verizon actually had a fiber service to offer -- the well-known FiOS -- which it "promised" to cover 100% of NYC by 2014. Back when that was announced in 2008, Karl Bode at BroadbandReports correctly warned that you should take that promise with a large grain of salt, both because of Verizon's past failures to live up to promises, as well as the loopholes hidden in the agreement.

It looks like he was right on both accounts. As the account (linked above) at the Verge notes, the language actually is that Verizon just needs to "pass all households," which is interpreted loosely:

There were a lot of caveats in the contract, however. Verizon is only required to "pass all households," a vague term that means the fiber need to extend "to a point from which the building can be connected to the network." Verizon is not obligated to make that connection, however. As a result, the company is now claiming around 75 percent accessibility, even though the number of New Yorkers who can actually sign up for FiOS is probably much lower. A study by public advocate Bill de Blasio concluded that just 51 percent of households in New York have fiber access. The city and Verizon dispute these figures.

Verizon is blaming landlords, but as the Verge points out, when someone made a big stink on the radio recently about the lack of FiOS in his apartment, Verizon contacted him the very next day, and had service at his apartment within 3 weeks. The simple fact is that Verizon has been trying its damnest to get out of the wired business altogether. Back when Ivan Seidenberg was in charge, he made a giant bet on fiber, which is why Verizon became such a national leader in broadband with FiOS -- a service that people really seem to love. However, Wall Street has always hated it, because it's capital intensive, and Wall St. recognizes that without any real competition in the broadband space, Verizon can avoid investing in such infrastructure upgrades, and just swim in larger profits while America's broadband infrastructure suffers and falls further and further behind other countries. Once Seidenberg left, the beancounters quickly took over and looked for ways to stop all that investment. Why invest in the future if there are no competitors to push you to do so?

The fact that Verizon had made this big deal with NYC? Well, Verizon knows it doesn't need to care because it doesn't appear that the NYC government cares at all. The most telling part of the article at the Verge is this tidbit:

The city seems satisfied with how Verizon has held up its end of the bargain. When asked whether Verizon had met its contract obligations, the mayor’s office first asked The Verge what Verizon had said, then referred us to DOITT [the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications], which actually has the contract. DOITT referred us to the mayor’s office. When told that the mayor wasn’t commenting, DOITT suggested we speak with Verizon. When pressed, a spokesperson said, "We just don’t have anything to add here."

Nice work, Verizon: you've fleeced yet another place.

Filed Under: broadband, fiber, nyc, promises, subsidies, tax breaks
Companies: verizon

How Far We've Fallen: Attorney General Eric Holder Promises Russians US Government Won't 'Torture' Or 'Kill' Ed Snowden

from the should-have-gone-without-saying dept

If you had any question about how low this country's reputation has sunk or how we're viewed worldwide for our open-ended detainment and torture of uncharged terrorism suspects, you need look no further than Attorney General Eric Holder's "reassuring" statement to the Russian Minister of Justice about whistleblower Ed Snowden's potential extradition.

Holder's letter pointed out that torture is "unlawful" in the United States and that the government wouldn't seek the death penalty, even if "Mr. Snowden were charged with additional, death penalty-eligible crimes."

William K. Black, writing for New Economic Perspectives, points out just how horrifically bizarre this situation is.

The idea that the Attorney General of the United States of America would send such a letter to the representative of a foreign government, particularly Russia under the leadership of a former KGB official, was so preposterous that I thought the first news report I read about Attorney General Holder’s letter concerning Edward Snowden was satire. The joke, however, was on me. The Obama and Bush administrations have so disgraced the reputation of the United States’ criminal justice system that we are forced to promise KGB alums that we will not torture our own citizens if Russia extradites them for prosecution.

When a nation, especially one considered to be the figurehead of the "free world," has to make promises to a former Cold War rival that it won't torture and kill a whistleblower, there can be little doubt that the country has reached its nadir. The US used to shelter dissidents from the vengeance of their former countries and once considered whistleblowers to be a part of a healthy government.

But now we've come to the point where the nation's lead prosecutor has to openly state that torture and killing are off the table, at least in regards to Ed Snowden. How reassuring. The government hasn't "tortured" and killed its other main antagonist, Bradley Manning, but it did hold him in solitary confinement for over three years and his treatment could easily be defined as "torture." (Although not in the only way that counts: the administration's definition.)

Holder's letter has hints of malevolence below the "cheery" no-torture-or-killing surface.

Holder phrased his explanation in a manner that suggests he was trying to be clever: “Torture is unlawful in the United States.” “Gitmo,” of course, is not “in the United States.” The locations of the many secret prisons the U.S. established in other nations were chosen so that we could torture suspects...

More subtly, note that Holder says that torture is “unlawful” – not “illegal.” An act that is merely “unlawful” cannot be prosecuted as a crime. It may provide the basis for a civil suit. An “illegal” act can be prosecuted.

This isn't very reassuring, but then again, a spokesman for the administration feeling compelled to make loosely worded "promises" about torture and killing isn't exactly reassuring either. As Black says, this should have been a forgone conclusion, and yet, AG Holder felt compelled to state this explicitly.

I always took it for granted that no U.S. attorney general would knowingly allow a criminal suspect in U.S. custody to be the victim of torture, raped, branded, or a host of other forms of brutality.

Our country isn't supposed to torture and kill American citizens (although we have no qualms about doing either to non-Americans, which is troubling in its own way). And yet, there's still enough gray area in this statement to make it technically possible. One way the government could get around the whole "we don't torture and kill American citizens [except when we do]" issue is to do what the UK does when one of its citizens is targeted by the US: strip the suspect of citizenship.

In early February, a leaked white paper from the Obama Justice Department caused a small stir, because it laid out an expansive set of circumstances under which the president could order a citizen killed abroad. In September 2011, the US killed Al Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, both US citizens, and a few weeks later a US drone strike in Yemen also killed Awlaki's 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman...

Meanwhile, the UK is stripping people it alleges of having joined militant groups of their citizenship, some of whom have gone on to be killed in US strikes. Stripping people of their citizenship, strips people of whatever protection they theoretically had as citizens under UK law.

The US has already revoked Snowden's passport (although it is offering him a one-time use passport should he choose to return to the welcoming, non-killing, non-torturing arms of the United States). There's no reason it can't revoke his citizenship should it be deemed necessary. All he needs to do is pose an "imminent threat," another one of the War on Terror's endlessly flexible "guidelines."

Of course, something as drastic as stripping Snowden of citizenship (and its attendant protections) is probably the most unlikely outcome. Holder's statement on the US government's intentions for Snowden is worded very specifically, most likely in hopes of preventing Snowden from taking advantage of the additional protection against extradition provided by the United Nations. Back when Snowden was still in Hong Kong, this point was raised by Tim Parker, a local immigration lawyer.

A handover could also be halted if Mr Snowden was believed to be in danger of receiving inhumane treatment in the US, Mr Parker added.

"If Mr Snowden is at risk of being detained under the sort of conditions that Bradley Manning has reportedly been detained, which the UN special rapporteurs have said amounted to cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment... then Hong Kong would not be allowed under its law, and could not extradite him to the US."

Making very public statements about torture and killing sounds more like Holder trying to talk loudly enough that the UN will overhear him. If the government isn't going to venture into "cruel" and "inhumane" territory (at least not out loud), Snowden can't reasonably expect to be shielded from extradition by the UN guidelines.

But whatever the administration's rationale for Holder's letter, the fact remains that the US government should never have slid to the disgraceful level where it feels its needs to make public promises about torture and killing. The fact that it has says a lot about the machinations of its anti-terror efforts -- one that turns whistleblowers into criminals and dissenting voices into terrorist sympathizers. If the administration wants to make a small effort towards rebuilding its reputation, it should consider dismissing the charges against Snowden and use the leaked information to open an actual discussion on national security and constitutional rights.

Filed Under: ed snowden, eric holder, nsa surveillance, promises, russia, torture

Mom Sues Preschool, Claiming It Didn't Prepare Her 4-Year-Old For The Ivy Leagues

from the this-can't-be-serious dept

In a story that seems to pull together some of the more insane stereotypes about Manhattan parents and their attitudes towards pre-schoolers, Manhattan Mom Nicole Impresscia has apparently sued the York Avenue Preschool, claiming her "very smart" 4-year-old was not properly prepared for the private schools of New York, and this could harm her chances of getting into an Ivy League college down the road. Her lawyer, Mathew Paulose, appears to have an interesting definition of "theft":

"This is about a theft where a business advertises as one thing and is actually another... They're nabbing $19,000 and making a run for it."

Of course, that's not even close to what's happening, and it's hardly "theft." Perhaps there's an argument that the school overstated its claims, but that's not "theft." Even looking deeper into the complaint, Impresscia's big concern seems to be that the 4-year-olds had to spend time with 2-year-olds, and had to spend time learning about shapes and colors. Apparently, her daughter is all over that. I'm struggling to see how that hurts a child's educational ability, but what do I know? I guess I didn't attend the right pre-school (and my Ivy League degrees must be mistakes).

Filed Under: preschool, promises

Jurors Required To Sign Promises Not To Google Details Of Case

from the modern-technology,-meet-the-courts dept

There have been plenty of stories concerning judges warning jurors not to research any additional items about a case online, but JJ points us to what is apparently a first (at least in California). A judge has ordered the jury to sign a document that they will not use the internet to research the case, and they can face perjury charges if they're caught doing so. Apparently, the reasoning is that most jurors tend to ignore the spoken warning. My guess is that many will ignore the signed promise as well -- in fact, as some behavioral research has shown, just telling them not to do it, may make them even more likely to do so. At some point, the courts are going to have to realize that you simply can't prevent people from looking up more info, and will have to come up with ways to adapt.

Filed Under: internet, juries, promises, search

How Difficult Is It To Post A Bill On The White House Website For Five Days?

from the come-on... dept

It seemed like a pretty straightforward campaign promise by President Obama: all non-critical bills that were passed by Congress would be placed on the White House website for five days for people to review before the President would sign or veto. It was a mostly symbolic gesture, since, once passed, there's not much that would likely happen to change the bill, but it could allow some to make the case, one way or another, for how President Obama should respond to the legislation. We were disappointed when, at the first opportunity, Obama totally ignored this promise and signed a bill just a day after Congress passed it.

Since then? It hasn't gotten any better. The NY Times is reporting that Obama has ignored this rather simple promise on nearly every bill put before him. That's not the "transparency" we were told to expect. Even worse, the White House has now "changed the terms" of the promise (which sure sounds like "breaking the promise"), saying they'll put draft bills on the website earlier and start the "five day" clock ticking then -- even though legislation may change before Congress votes on it.

And then... there's the bizarre claim that the White House couldn't fulfill the promise due to "unexpected technical hurdles." Really? Putting up the details of a law? And waiting five days? What kind of technical hurdles are we talking about. I recognize that there are campaign promises that get broken, but there are usually at least decent reasons why. In this case, it seems to be because no one in the administration actually cares. And that's disappointing.

Filed Under: president obama, promises, transparency, white house

AT&T Says Its Network Can't Keep Up With All The Cool Stuff You Can Do With The Smartphones It Sells

from the nice-touch dept

AT&T caught a lot of flak at the beginning of April, when it updated the terms of service for its mobile data network, banning all sorts of activities on it. AT&T later said the changes had been made in "error" and removed the new language, though it later reinserted language banning "redirecting television signals for viewing on Personal Computers" -- a ban apparently aimed directly at the forthcoming SlingPlayer application for the iPhone, which lets users watch TV from their Slingbox at home on their mobile device. The app has now been released, but it only works over WiFi, not the 3G mobile connection, because AT&T says, in a nutshell, that its mobile network doesn't have enough capacity to support streaming-video services if they take off. So all those cool data applications Apple and AT&T tout for the iPhone or other smartphones sold by the operator? Just remember they exist only at the behest of the carrier; if they threaten to expose its network's shortcomings, they'll get blocked.

Filed Under: impressions, network, promises, smartphones
Companies: at&t