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AT&T Buys Congress: Alert The Media

Thanks to Russell Shaw's blog we have the sound of the other shoe dropping. Recently I wrote about bully-boy Ed Whitacre Jr., the CEO of AT&T, and his plans to extort money from Google and Yahoo and other successful Internet services (see Google Is About To Become Ed Whitacre's Worst Nightmare). Shaw points out why Whitacre needs the money: to buy more Congressmen in his battle to defeat that menace to our American Way of Life, wireless broadband service.

What Shaw turned up is this: Sen. John Ensign (R-Nevada) and Rep. Pete Sessions, (R-Texas) have both drafted legislation to outlaw municipal WiFi, no secret there. But which two congressmen do you suppose have received the most dollars in contributions this year from AT&T (formerly SBC) Why, that's right. How did you know? Aren't you shocked? I'm shocked.

Rep. Sessions leads all candidates according to Shaw's figures, with $15,250 of AT&T's dollars in his pocket, and Sen. Ensign is second, with $12,000.

If that's the price of a congressman, then with 435 Representatives and 100 Senators, or 535 palms to grease at an average of $13,625 apiece, it will cost Whitacre $3.7 million to buy a majority vote. (But of course Congress doesn't sell itself that cheaply. That's just Whitacre's share of the tab — Comcast, Verizon, and the other big telcos and cable empires will have to kick in similar amounts.)

If they do it could be the best money they spend this year. The telcos like SBC/AT&T, in particular, are dinosaurs. VoIP will drive them out of business. Municipal WiFi is a sure bet to eat Whitacre's lunch. Buying the same sort of protectionist, anti-competitive legislation that Congress has sold to other industries (I think of the Millenium Copyright Act, for example) is just about his only hope.

Forbidding local governments to get into telecommunications has a lot of appeal for the curent Congress — it's Big Government disguised as anti-government. And obviously there's a lot of money in it. But it's a serious problem for a country that is falling behind the rest of the world in the implementation of technology we pioneered. If Whitacre gets his legislation it should be called the Un-Patriotic Act.

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