Earlier this year, Verizon Wireless submitted an application to the Federal Communications Commission to purchase additional spectrum from four cable providers. Verizon Wireless is playing a real-life game of Monopoly – teaming up with Comcast, Time Warner, and other cable providers to create a “quadruple play” behemoth and lock consumers into even higher prices.
The cable market shouldn’t be divvied up in secret by a handful of executives in a corporate boardroom.
Competition is essential for consumers to get the fairest prices, the best service, and the most choices. If this deal goes through, Verizon will have no incentive to continue building its FiOS high-speed network into new areas, so consumers will be stuck with limited choices for their cable service.
Less FiOS also means fewer jobs building, maintaining, servicing, and installing the network. This deal will create a corporate behemoth that will use exclusive quad-play market power to shrink its future workforce.
What’s more, Verizon Wireless and the cable companies are pushing the Federal Communications Commission to approve this deal without providing full disclosure about its specifics. The documents they provided to the FCC are heavily redacted, so we don’t even know the full extent of the risks to cable competition.
Stand with thousands of consumers across the country and tell the FCC to block this bad deal: www.cwa-union.org/nomonopoly
