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Telecom & Wireless

AT&T Net Neutrality Pokes Cable In The Eye

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Stocks:  (T)(BLS)(CMCSA)(TWX)(CVC)

Sweet irony. AT&T agrees not to charge large websites like Google and Yahoo! extra fees for their traffic over its broadband pipes, so-called "net neutrality" to gets its merger with BellSouth approved by the FCC. Good for the big web companies.

But, bad for the cable companies that AT&T is fighting to get customers for voice, broadband and video services. With AT&T acting the part of the great beneficent provider of an internet gateway, how can companies like Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Cablevision, or Cox go to that largest websites and ask for tolls for their traffic? Especially when those tolls will almost certainly be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.

To get is merger done, AT&T has set up a situation that is almost certain to block its competition from creating a new revenue stream from their huge networks.

AT&T gets it merger, but it also hampers the competition. Smooth move. The next thing you know, T will be giving away free subscriptions to Vonage. That would PO the cable guys.

Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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