California state regulators say AT&T lied to the Federal Communications Commission in an attempt to shut off its old copper phone network without providing an adequate replacement.
“AT&T asserts that California seeks to prohibit or hinder wireline carriers from discontinuing copper facilities and investing in fiber,” said a June 15 filing by the state of California and the California Public Utilities Commission. “Indeed, AT&T has been making this argument for years. It is not and has never been true.”
As we reported last month, AT&T sued California over the state’s refusal to let it stop providing phone service to all potential customers in its wireline network territory. AT&T also petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to declare that California cannot enforce its rules and to let AT&T stop providing service to about 199,000 phone customers.
Everywhere I’ve worked still has tons of POTS lines. Sure, you can switch them to LTE or 5G if you happen to be in the city. Rural areas just get fucked though.
It’s endgame people, the law will no longer protect any of us.
But it will absolutely be used against us.
Ha, this reminds me of how angry I got at NPR the other day when they aired this. They were all too happy for the centerpiece of their story to be an interview with some spokesperson who did the classic move of blaming Overbearing California Regulations as a problem, saying that it’s forcing them to keep a shitty old system in place, and then they moved on to the next piece without addressing how the real problem was that AT&T is refusing to install new equipment before cutting off service to the old stuff. California’s regulations are saving hundreds of thousands of people from losing service, and somehow they’re the bad guy here.
Drives me fucking crazy that NPR is somehow considered a left leaning news source. I guess it’s all relative, huh…
Have you been providing feedback to NPR?
A few times. I first started disliking NPR in 2016 when their coverage was so bad that I felt compelled several times to ask them to stop pretending Bernie was fringe, but that obviously never changed. I’d say I get fed up enough to send them a thing like once a year. They don’t care; their big donors have always been corporate, even before their federal funding got cut.
Last time I sent feedback I was asking them to make local stations’ newscasts accessible on NPR One; I can’t find an archive of any local station’s newscasts, and the only way to listen to them online at all was to first skip past the national one and just hope the local one was queued up.
Since I sent that, I no longer get my local casts on NPR One at all. Probably a coincidence, I must be tuning in at the wrong time of day… Idk. Fuck em.
Fuck, I remember like 2010 NPR being faux left presenting conservatives. Putting climate deniers with zero background on the same level as actual fucking scientists. Something about how they covered BLM protests also bugged me but I could never put my finger on it.
NPR is more corporate funded media, sure it’s through whoever’s endowment, but it’s the same difference. Like the New York Times, when the stakes are high and issues dead serious, you can count on a bullshit neoliberal take.
Yeah. One of their big donors is the Walton Family Foundation. That’s the Walmart family.
And the estate of Joan B. Kroc. She’s the (third) wife of Ray Kroc, the guy that made McDonald’s what it is today.
So is Zuckerberg’s foundation
It’s partly because there realistically is no substantial left-wing voice remaining in the US. The right and corporations do their best to label centrist positions as far left positions, and the Overton Window continually shifts to the right as a result.
It’s also really, really popular to hate on California at the moment. The facts never matter.
Definitely sad that it’s NPR in this case, though.
It’s always been popular to hate on California.
California doesn’t put much effort into making itself actually likeable. They hoard unlikeable individuals like Pokemon cards.
Don’t worry, we don’t like those people either, but they still won’t leave.
Nooo wayyyyy whatttt im soooo surprised 😑
