No audits or investigations or explanations of the players or the largest state telefommunications public utility that cover LA County; (AT&T et al.) red-lined, cross-subsidized, overcharged, and failed to upgrade America’s critical wired, public utility infrastructure over the last 30 years — including LA County.
The IRREGULATORS, November, 2022
- Filed with LA County a summary of the articles, called for investigations, etc —
The open letters were posted to Medium:
- Dear LA County: Time to Investigate How AT&T (Pac Bell) Helped to Create the Digital Divide.
- Dear LA County: Investigate the Real Shockeroo; America’s Egregious Broadband Rates vs the EU 27 Prices.
- Treasure Chest of Billions to Solve the Digital Divide for Cities, Counties and States: Dear LA County….
On Nov. 15th, 2022 the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors voted to modify obscure parts of the law, (Title 16 and Title 22) — with the claims that this relaxation of regulation will help to give low income families in rural America and inner cities a potential for wireless, with the hopes of solving the Digital Divide.
(NOTE: The picture above is focused on ALL of America’s broadband proceedings where there is no mention of “XXXXXX” or of the history of the fiber optic no-shows, or any due diligence, or any audits of the financial shell game we exposed, much less exposing the embedded conflicts of interest of the organizations, companies and people — vs the public’s interests.)
As we pointed out in our comments, “AT&T California” is never seriously mentioned throughout the LA County Digital Divide information. We dubbed this omission ‘The Company we will not name’, (like the character in the Harry Potter tales). So did this decision and the omissions of basic material facts violate basic laws to protect the public interest?
Talk about a failure to present basic material facts. AT&T California, formerly Pacific Bell, is still the state-based telecommunications public utility that covers 80% of the entire state, including most of Los Angeles County, and it had obligations to upgrade the state’s critical infrastructure with fiber optics, starting in the 1990’s. In fact, what is now AT&T, Verizon and Centurylink all had plans and all made thousands of statements about these plans. And even though they all got paid billions to do this work, instead, they left most of their copper-based territories to deteriorate and thus did not bring broadband competition to the cable companies that would lower prices and give options.
Thus, is there a requirement for the Board of Supervisors to mention in the proceeding, that there is a company called “AT&T California” (dubbed ‘The Company that shall not be named’) and to make it clear that it is the primary public telecommunications utility for the state of California, (and LA County), etc.?