History Repeating Itself

I am old enough to remember the breakup of the old American Telephone & Telegraph Company in 1982 after a legal battle that cost billions of dollars.  The company was fat with arrogance, lacking in advanced technology and ripe for an antitrust suit.

Today, 26 years later, I find the similarities between the old American Telephone & Telegraph Company at the time of the antitrust breakup and Comcast, the cable giant, to be astonishing.  Then, American Telephone & Telegraph Company had strangled competition in the telephone industry for decades; today, Comcast is the big bully on the block in the monopolistic cable industry in America and part of the reason that the quality of Internet access for Americans lags behind the rest of the world. 

The other large cable outfit, Verizon, at least has made an effort to grapple with advanced conceptual thinking and technology in the 21th-century — such as collaboration with some of the Internet’s leaders and by switching to high capacity fiber optic delivery of content instead of old-fashioned copper wire that has been around for more than a century and a half.  Not so Comcast.  Comcast remains locked in copper wire thinking, more reminiscent of the dusty old American Telephone and Telegraph Company.

While blogging these last few days about Comcast blocking my wife’s outgoing work email over our home service, a lot of friends have sent messages of support, opening doors to powerful support and sharing a common sentiment that Comcast is now positioned, by its own arrogance, for a form of federally mandated deregulation.  

The fact that my wife - a long-time and well-respected voice on Capitol Hill, at the White House and State Department in Washington - has been targeted by Comcast has gotten a lot of attention, especially in the nation’s capital.

While I am sincerely grateful, we still have not solved my wife’s email problem — when she occasionally checks her work email from home to address a critical international religious freedom or human rights issue, Comcast has blocked her ability to respond to an email or to send an email because they believe the volume of emails she receives makes her a spammer.  Only one word comes to mind to describe such corporate thinking - insane.