By Elliott Brack, editor and publisher | Can you see any benefit from AT&T taking over (not “merging”) with Time Warner?
Do you really think a bigger AT&T is automatically better?
Why is it that these big conglomerates think that buying more companies will improve the situation, at least for those of us down here in the trenches? We can see that a larger company may make the income of the top brass significantly higher than their present fat-checks. But that surely doesn’t help the Average Joe.
Not only that, but what Fat Cat can tell much difference in making $4.2 million a year and $8.4 million a year? And that is probably underestimating the payment for many of those high-in-the-cloud execs.
We hope AT&T is overreaching in trying to pull off this absorption of Time Warner.
Now understand: we’re not defending Time Warner. It’s big enough as it is.
And from what we hear from a friend who is on Time Warner Cable, trying to get better service, or any service at all, is most difficult from that firm already. They have already grown so and “improved” so much that they are already giving the bad service that will surely continue to come if AT&T and Time Warner get together. They’re already not serving the customers as they should.
Most of big mergers are simply not needed. And many times they don’t work out. Look what happened to AOL when Time-Warner scooped ‘em up!
Bad things come of mergers in many industries, communications, drug companies, banks. Many of these firms are already “too big to fail,” so they say, asking special provisions or even governmental bailouts so that total economies don’t fail.
You may remember that in 1982 AT&T had to relinquish control of the various “Baby Bells” that provided local telephone service. Without a guaranteed customer for its Western Electric and Bells Labs subsidiary, AT&T started faltering. Through several moves, one of the Baby Bells (Bell Southwestern) eventually got control of the AT&T name, and continued to absorb companies and grow.
Today the new AT&T Inc. is headquartered in Dallas. Atlanta is the location of the headquarters for AT&T Mobility, formerly Cingular Wireless. There’s a AT&T Global Network Operation Center and is the headquarters of AT&T Corp., the long-distance subsidiary of AT&T Inc.
AT&T is big, really big. And try to do business with the company on the telephone: first you have to talk to a computer, which says it can recognize whole sentences. But it takes you almost five minutes if you have a problem to eventually talk to a real person.
And that’s before this proposed takeover of Time Warner.
As far as we are concerned, we hope that Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, our local Congressmen, and our Senators will all take notice of what AT&T is trying to do, and halt this take-over.
About the only person we can immediately think will really benefit is Ted Turner, who owns a stack of Time Warner stock. We don’t mind Ted getting richer, since he works to improve the world through being a great environmentalist.
Be on notice, AT&T. Lots of us will fight you on this one!
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