There is such a thing as TOO big
January 31, 2005 by Mike Wendland
This makes me real nervous. Isn’t the sort of company SBC and AT&T would become exacly the reason the government broke up the Bells in the seventies? RedNova News - SBC Announces Deal to Buy AT&T
Times, they are a changin’. Get used to it.
Thanks to our current “Business Friendly” administration, they’ll let things like this happen. What really concerns me about these mega-mergers is that thousands are left without a job and prices still stay the same.
Without competition, these oligopolies can get away with charging whatever they want. Just look at cable service. If I want cable in my area, Comcast is the ONLY choice. We ditched them 2 years ago because rates were getting out-of-control. Rates were already sky high, but the final nail in the coffin was when they mandated that we either switch to digital cable (and pay an extra $5 per month for each box) or we can stick with analog but lose 20%+ of our channels.
We switched to DirecTV and have seen our rates go up by exactly $1 in 2 years.
However, we do have to recognize that the bells are under increasing pressure, as people like me ditch their land-lines in favor of mobile phones.
My fear with this consolidation is that dispite the massive cable and phone infrastructure (which we’d use for VOIP, among other things), too few companies will end up owning the infrastructure… thereby limiting both choice and competition.