Son of Frankentobacco

As if the telecom market meltdown isn't bad enough, the industry now bids to give us a legal shakedown too. It comes in the form of a new strategy marrying two of the most debilitating parts of U.S. law: antitrust and mass tort claims.

This an article based in part, on selective memory. The deal was that the baby bells would get to enter the long distance market if they allowed competition to use the "last-mile" wiring to your house. Well, people like Verizon deliberately dragged their useless, dead dinosaur feet when their more nimble competitors were ready to roll out things like DSL, practically bankrupting them in the process, until Verizon was ready to roll out their own DSL services. Incompetent, bureaucratic, sloth-like monopolies like Verizon get absolutely no sympathy from me and to hear them whining about how they have to share the last-mile wire after they got what they wanted in the way of long-distance access is nothing but lame BS.

Incompetent, bureaucratic, sloth-like monopolies like Verizon get absolutely no sympathy from me and to hear them whining about how they have to share the last-mile wire after they got what they wanted in the way of long-distance access is nothing but lame BS.

But the point of this article is that the disputes between the incompetent, sloth-like monopolies and parasitic, Potemkin-village-like competitors should be used to line the pockets of the plaintiffs class action bar.

Legitimate competitors like Covad are like gnats compared to Verizon. Verizon has done everything possible to make the lives of their competitors miserable and unprofitable despite their agreements to the contrary. I agree that the thrust of the article relates that this appears to be another lawyer driven feeding frenzy, but I still can't let Verizon skate on revisionist history.

Ok, let's take somebody you would qualify as a "legitimate" competitor to the Bells. ChoiceOne. This outfit stretches from Ohio to Maine and Verizon hoses them at every turn. Trying to get an answer out of Verizon is like trying to get the right answer out of the IRS. ChoiceOne has to sit there and take it because if they complain, Verizon just proceeds to make life even more miserable for them.

Further, Covad wouldn't have been tempted to puff their orders if Verizon hadn't been back in the stone age and moving at the speed of molasses in Alaska in February with the backlog of orders that they had that were legitimate. People like Covad were ready to boogie with legit orders they couldn't fill because Verizon was, as usual, asleep at the wheel and didn't feel they had to honor the terms of their agreements. A year and a half went by before Verizon was ready to roll out their own *lame* DSL offering and, as predicted, it was an unparalleled horror show that took them another year to straighten out. I had a commercial DSL line in from Covad that worked first time, every time since day one and the Verizon DSL in the same area was down more than it was up for months.

Verizon doesn't spend a dime on anything unless they get dragged kicking and screaming into doing it. As late as 1992, I lived in a town in MA with a 1940's stepper switch CO! Think they got a return on their investment on that one? :-) Even in areas where they had digital switches, they couldn't muster the gusto to pass a 9600 baud modem.

Verizon is a classic example of the bloated, somnambulent monopolies of the type that produced the Pinto and Vega and I just can't handle any of their whining or anybody whining for them. ;-) Not that I like parasite lawyers any better ;-)

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