Concerns About Anti-Competitive Factors Remain
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She said that its about the agreement by
Verizon and the cable companies not to compete. The deal is a far-reaching
non-compete agreement between two huge competitors, Mark said in her
statement. While it's nice that Verizon will cede a small portion of its vast
spectrum holdings to T-Mobile, that does nothing to mitigate the fact that
Verizon and Cable want to stop competing, stop investing, and stop innovating
to the great detriment of consumers and the American economy.
Cathy Sloan, vice president of Government
Relations for the Computer & Communications Industry Association told eWEEK that most observers had expected a
spectrum divestiture from Verizon Wireless as a condition of the FCCs approval
of the cable company spectrum deal. But she said that a number of other
issues are really a lot more important, including WiFi offload, especially in
urban areas where cable companies could provide data services, but favor some
carriers phones over others. She also noted that the CCIA was concerned about
backhaul services, since nearly all of those service are provided by AT&T
and Verizon, the two largest players in the wireless space.
For the Communications Workers of American,
the concern is all about jobs. According to a statement released by the CWA,
the Verizon Wireless-Big Cable proposal would allow Verizon and the cable
companies to agree not to compete with each other.
The threat of job loss and higher consumer
prices from the proposed Verizon Wireless-Big Cable deal remains, even if
today's announcement resolves some of the FCC's concerns about one piece of the
agreement," said Debbie Goldman, telecommunications policy director for
the CWA in a prepared statement.
"The CWAalong with major consumer
groups and elected officialscontinues to voice concerns with federal regulators
about the monopolistic cross-marketing arrangement and urges regulators to put
conditions on this deal to ensure it is in the public interest.
Verizon has cut 14,750 jobs of frontline
wireline workers in the eight states and Washington, D.C., in its East Cost
landline footprint since 2010, and the proposed deal would cost more jobs as
the company loses the incentive to expand its FiOS service to new areas, the
CWA noted in its statement.
In reality, the Verizon deal with the cable
companies consists of two only slightly related issues. One is spectrum
availability and concentration of spectrum by one company. The other issue
is whether that deal necessarily includes the agreement not to compete or
whether the spectrum deal between Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile and the cable
companies is separate from any cross-marketing deal and its possible effect on
competition. At this point, no one has presented conclusive evidence that they
are necessarily linked despite the concerns. But this is one issue that the U.S.
Department of Justice needs to sort out.
Wayne Rash is a Senior Analyst for eWEEK Labs and runs the magazine's Washington Bureau. Prior to joining eWEEK as a Senior Writer on wireless technology, he was a Senior Contributing Editor and previously a Senior Analyst in the InfoWorld Test Center. He was also a reviewer for Federal Computer Week and Information Security Magazine. Previously, he ran the reviews and events departments at CMP's InternetWeek.He is a retired naval officer, a former principal at American Management Systems and a long-time columnist for Byte Magazine. He is a regular contributor to Plane & Pilot Magazine and The Washington Post.
