IRREGULATORS PRESENTATION
NY LEGAL HACKERS, MAY 25th, 2023
Bruce Kushnick, Managing Director, bruce@newnetworks.com
Proposed Hackathon
Legal, Accounting, Tech, Public Policy, Media & Investigative Reporting, Hackathon –– 2 Combined Events:
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Alternative Path for Solving the Digital Divide
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Fixing Communication: Violations & Egregious Acts
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Who We Are: The IRREGULATORS is an independent, consortium of senior telecom experts, analysts, forensic auditors, and lawyers who are former senior staffers from the FCC, state advocate and Attorneys General Office experts and lawyers, as well as former telco consultants.
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Bruce Kushnick, VITA Managing Director, IRREGULATORS.
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Featured: Should We Trust the Companies that Created the Digital Divide? For those of you who don’t know Bruce Kushnick, he’s been tracking the promises made and broken by Verizon since the 1990s and written extensively on the issue.
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SUMMARY Legal, Accounting, Tech, Public Policy, Media & Investigative Reporting, Hackathon –– 2 Combined Events:
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Alternative Path for Solving the Digital Divide
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Fixing Communications: Violations & Egregious Acts
The IRREGULATORS working with X, X, and X (TBA) have created a nationwide event that will have law school, business and accounting school, public policy, tech school students, and joined by investigative reporting students, to help present an alternative path for solving the Digital Divide, not through government subsidies by to create legal and regulatory state and federal actions that must be taken.
With over $100 billion in state and federal funding to ‘solve’ the Digital Divide, we find that the some of the largest recipients are the same companies that helped to create the Digital Divide– They being–AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, (Lumen), and their allies, the cable companies, including Charter and Comcast, Through their monopoly power, they were able to actually rewrite history and hide how the telecom companies failed to upgrade America with fiber optics over the last 3 decades, letting the entire US wired infrastructure deteriorate. In fact, no government broadband agency has discussed the previous fiber optic plans in their state — or how communications customers have been and continue to pay for network upgraded they never received.
But this is only part of the story. Starting in 2000, AT&T et al. were able to manipulate the accounting of the state telecommunications public utilities, — such as Verizon NY or AT&T California — and it is one of the largest accounting scandals in America’s history. The accounting was corrupted so that the majority of all expenses would be allocated to the utility and local service, while the other subsidiaries not only paid a fraction of the expenses, but it allowed the companies to divert the construction budget to build out the wireless networks, — and so the rural and inner cities were never upgraded to high speed broadband, — creating the Digital Divide.
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Alternative Path for Solving the Digital Divide
The Alternative Path starts with a ‘knowledge base’ survey — to document what experts, politicians, government agencies and the public does or does not know. We uncovered that virtually no one knows the history of broadband in their state or even who the companies are.
Should America’s public policies and the disbursement of a hundred billion dollars to some of the very companies that created this digital desert be dictated by an ongoing ignorance of basic facts, or worse, a repetition of miss-information supplied by the companies?
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Fixing Communications: Violations & Egregious Acts
The IRREGULATORS has created a roadmap, which is based on three decades of research, to be vetted by the attending schools. Then, a select number of actions will be started — with the goal, of having the networks upgraded to fiber optics and lower prices through halting the current financial and customer overcharging. We also expose a massive accounting scandal, which undermines any attempt to solve this Digital morass.
Teams will be formed. The legal analysis, the accounting and financial analysis, will be created with students and the IRREGULATORS and other experts and lawyers. Moreover, investigative reporters and media students will track the process, as well as help to tell the stories.
READING ROOM: We created two new books to tell the public the story and supply a roadmap of the issues that America must address, now.
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Extensive Resource Library of our filings, reports, and legal and regulatory actions over the last 40 years
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Violations & Egregious Acts, is the 4th book of an overstuffed trilogy that started in 1998; The other books include “$200 Billion Broadband Scandal”,
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DISS-CONNECTED, is designed as a quick-read-general public, short and cheaper version — (IRREGULATORS-LTE).
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Summary Articles, 2022-2023
Federal and State Broadband Government Agencies Are Clueless or Captured
§ 4 Charts that Will Scare Every State & Federal Broadband, Digital Divide Policy Maker
Broadband Scandal
§ What Do You Mean America had National and State Fiber Optic Plans in 1993? We Were Punked.
Pricing and Billing Are Out of Control
§ Verizon’s Wireless Overcharging per GB, 7,400%-to-65,000% vs Overseas Prices.
§ Are Made-Up, Hidden, Broadcast-Sports Fees You Pay Quintuple-Taxed with Other Made-Up Fees?
ACCOUNTING MANIPULATION
§ Verizon New York 2021 Annual Report Reveals Massive Financial Scandal.
Wireless Bait and Switch: Quotes from Executives and Regulators
§ 15 Quotes: The Wireline-Wireless Bait-&-Switch Overcharged America and Caused the Digital Divide.
The Fiber to the Home, FTTH, Wires Were Put In As Title II, Common Carrier Networks, and are Part of the State Telecommunications Utility– Funded by Local phone service and wired customers.
§ Verizon’s Fiber Optic Networks Are ‘Title II’ — Here’s What the FCC Should Do
Halt the Wireless and Corporate Operations Subsidies.
Going After ALEC and the Monopoly Controls.
§ Secrets of an AT&T Scandal and the Ties to ALEC.