Violations & Egregious Acts – Trillion Dollar Broadband Scandal (book)

The Book of Violations & Egregious Acts: Trillion Dollar Broadband Scandalis a summary of 30-years of research, legal and regulatory challenges that follows three earlier studies.

A trillion dollars of overcharges is a lot a money, an egregious act. And this is the low estimate. We are about to take you on a ride on the info-highway that is a dirt road where the big telecom cartel — AT&T, Verizon and CenturyLink, the caretakers of our critical telecommunications infrastructure — have let it deteriorate. Since 1992, they got paid about $500 billion by their local service customers to upgrade the aging copper wires of the state public telecommunications networks and have not done so. Where that money went is a true broadband scandal.

But, this is only a small part of the overall violations and egregious acts. Through a series of bait-and-switch tactics used repeatedly, the big telecom companies were able to overcharge customers in many ways that fostered one of the largest accounting scandals in American history at an estimated cost of $1.3 trillion and counting. This book analyses the grift, overcharging, and diversion of funds that the companies have perpetrated on the American public for several decades.

Over the last 30 years, the New Bell companies repeatedly claimed that they would roll-out a new technology that would transform telecommunications if they got more money. These technologies ranged from video-dialtone to ISDN, to fiber-optics and now 5G wireless. And every time they were helped by an army of paid-off politicians, co-opted non-profits, coin-operated research firms.

And this book is not a history lesson. Now, as if by magic, Congress approved and Biden signed the Infrastructure Bill that included $65 billion to solve the Digital Divide. The telecom companies are lining up to line their pocket by claiming that this time they will deliver high-speed broadband and close the Digital Divide. Only they plan to do so with wireless and without any constraints on pricing these services.

This book is grounded in a series of core questions: Why do Americans pay a great deal more for their telecommunications services than people in other advanced countries yet get inferior service? And why does the Digital Divide persist after decades of big telecom commitments to deploy fiber to the home that the American public continues to pay for right up to the present?

AT&T, Verizon and Centurylink have been able to hijack common wisdom, literally. Even the experts are quoting a fictional history or broadband and virtually no one can answer basic questions about what was supposed to be delivered in their state, or the billions in overcharging that has been going on for decades through a series of different steps, from manipulating the accounting to the use of biased data.

What makes this book different

• Go after the violations & egregious acts. The book lays out a ‘clean sweep’ agenda, a roadmap for taking legal and regulatory challenges in the states, as well as at the federal level
• Go after the money: We believe that there is a treasure chest of funding that should be used to solve the Digital Divide without additional government subsidies. Each state needs to go after the cross-subsidies of wireless as well as the addition of corporate operations expenses that have been added to the state public utilities, among other financial machinations caused by the accounting manipulations.

• New Networks Institute (NNI) has started a nationwide, resource library and database covering 30 years of broadband and accounting failures and history, by state.
• The IRREGULATORS is an independent consortium of telecom experts, lawyers, and expert auditors. The group, formed in 2014, has helped to create this new book and the plans for fixing the digital divide.