The Tech For 8/16/10: The Lovely Hypocrisy Of AT&T

Loving what Google and their growing bitter rivals Verizon conjured up last week in their secret little deal, those folks at AT&T have decided to chime in their two cents of making sure telecom power remains another example of corporate domination in America.

It is definitely the opposite of what Al Franken thinks.

Policymakers can help by reallocating more spectrum for CMRS use and, even more importantly, by protecting wireless broadband networks from onerous new net neutrality regulations. The latter is vital to the continued growth of the industry. In order to provide consumers with the high quality wireless broadband services that they demand, wireless carriers must to be able to dynamically manage traffic and operate their networks in an environment free from burdensome, arbitrary and unnecessary regulations.

Oh wonderful, another example of corporations hating regulations in your full peripheral.

Does their excuse words of "provide the consumer with the high quality" and "continued growth" remind you of another industry railing against the threat of them not being made more powerful than they already are?

It really is analogous to how Wall Street always has the canard about "growth being affected" if someone holds them accountable for being the robber barons and diabolically sneaky con artists that they are. It wouldn't be a surprise at all if certain PR firms that facilitated our financial overlords' messaging influenced the telecom behemoths to shape theirs as well.

Then again, AT&T is smart enough to play the game effectively by themselves. But even their bellyaching about the "onerous" nature of Net Neutrality and striving to be the "best friends of their consumers" is quite fascinating considering their own burdensome and consumer unfriendly practices in helping the NSA with the Patriot Act (which is still quietly going on right now).

They will never bring up how they participated in eviscerating a portion of the public's 4th Amendment rights with the last Administration (there goes that "Conservatives loving the Constitution" argument blown up again) and now this current one still. Yet, when it comes to their profits being in some limbo, you know their Code Red alarms go right off.

Lawrence Latiff of the solid digital publisher The Inquirer adds the perspective needed on this company's actions:

The bare-faced cheek of the company calling net neutrality 'onerous' is a disgrace and simply goes to show how much AT&T and the like care for their paying customers. As we and many others had predicted, Google's deal with Verizon has opened the floodgates for telecoms operators to make ridiculous claims in order to destroy net neutrality and promote their own agenda of what AT&T termed 'continued growth'.

It should also be noted that AT&T's statement made no reference to how its network performance affects its subscribers. Rather it reads like a sob story, except that it's being told by a company that raked in $123 billion in revenues and about 12.5 billion profit last year alone

Angry that Verizon was making them look silly with their funny (though a little disingenuous) "3G coverage" commercials, AT&T had those terrible reply ads with Luke Wilson acting like a pompous unfunny clown.

But those abysmal Wilson spots were a true representation of how a corporate hindrance AT&T currently is to the public.

The fight for "Net Neutrality" just went up another level.