How the Bells Win: Persistence

It's their job to fight these bureaucratic turf wars. It's about the only thing they do.

So when an opponent wins a fight in one venue, the Bells go to the next. And the next and the next and the next. Until they find someone they can buy or browbeat into agreeing with them.

Then they roll-back everyone else, using the new precedent.

That's the way it's going in Lafayette, Louisiana. The citizens voted to put in a municipal fiber network. This despite Bell push-polling, phone calls based on a fraudulent premise (trying to get opinions) that in fact, pushed "facts" and rhetoric-as-facts in order to change minds.

Didn't work. So they will try to forbid this through the state. And then the federal government. And then they will go to court.

And when all that doesn't work, they will just refuse to cooperate. They won't give access to poles and other assets, even after they're told to. Papers will be lost, people will go missing for days.

That's how they killed the CLECs (Competitive Local Exchange Carriers). They refused to obey the 1996 Telecommunications Act until they could get it overturned.

Meanwhile they will fight all those old battles all over again, until they win one, and then try to roll everything up.

The only solution is to break them up. Separate the transmission of the bits from what the bits do. Don't give a monopoly in either case. Just split both Bells in two, horizontally this time instead of vertically. Or maybe with a big "Z" mark for Zorro.

If Winston Churchill could match his rhetoric to the Bells' actions, Great Britain would still be a Great Power.

"We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields, and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender!"