Do you want to know if AT&T boosts your rates? Maybe you want to pay only for services you ordered or explicitly authorized. Tough! AT&T's new 2,500 page "guidebook" is the latest spawn of California's failing experiment with deregulation, one that is in "direct violation" of the law, according to the Public Utilities Commission.
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Verizon, AT&T, and their regulated cohorts love to blab how the "free market" and "competition" will keep prices low for consumers. According to California, it's a big fat expensive lie. The cost of basic phone service has soared since the Public Utilities Commission lifted price controls in 2006, leading the agency to conclude:
"There is no indication of any change in the near future regarding the current state of competition. Market forces have not yet met the challenge of controlling price increases."
Monsanto failed to get the FDA to ban "rBGH-free" labeling nationally, and it's had mixed success at the state level. Now the company and its gang of ethics-free dairy farmers (those are the ones who use rBGH to increase profits, but want that truth kept out of the marketplace because it's unpopular with consumers) have scored a significant win in Ohio this week. Yesterday the state passed a law that forces extra, rBGH-friendly fine print on every milk label that promotes itself as "rBGH-free." The goal of the ruling: to require expensive label redesigns on competitors, and to crowd the label with unnecessary fine print in order to dilute the marketing power of the "rBGH-free" label.
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Even our readers can't agree on whether net neutrality is a good or a bad thing, so we thought we'd stoke the fire with a nice side-by-side comparison of sample broadband options for consumers in two "free markets," the US and the UK. Art Brodsky of the Huffington Post (oops, we probably already lost half of you) writes that a British man he met while traveling showed him a spreadsheet he'd put together that compared 59 different broadband providers, so he'd know which one to do business with.
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Mark your calendar for January 29, Milton Friedman Day, a day when the invisible hand of the marketplace takes a break and gives ol' Miltie a reacharound.
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