Posted by: AT&T Blog Team on January 31, 2012 at 2:00 pm
Attribute the following statement to AT&T’s Senior Vice President-Federal Regulatory and Chief Privacy Officer, Bob Quinn:
“Reform of the government’s universal service Lifeline program is long overdue. The Lifeline program administered by the FCC is growing at an alarming rate – the fund had 33% year-over-year growth from 2010 to 2011 alone and has more than doubled in size since the end of 2008. If every person eligible were to subscribe to the program, the fund would stand at over $5 billion dollars – three times the size of the fund today.
“While the steps the FCC announced today are commendable, we fear the speed of reform is getting far outpaced by the actual dollar growth of the fund itself. Policymakers must begin to discuss whether it continues to make sense for an independent agency to administer a fund this size with no Congressional oversight or decision-making input to the appropriate size of the fund. Counterpart programs for both energy and food are not administered in this manner. They are subject to the Congressional budgetary processes and are not funded by taxing the users of those services – no one must pay an 18% tax on the electric bill to fund the low income electric programs. One has to wonder why communications consumers are treated differently in this regard.
“While that discussion is hopefully taking place, we will continue to work with the Commission to implement these reforms and hopefully work to move quickly on the most necessary reforms (like taking eligibility decisions out of the hands of consumers and service providers) addressed in today’s Order and Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.”
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Posted by: Bob Quinn on January 27, 2012 at 3:48 pm
The business, education and advocacy communities have joined forces to observe Data Privacy Day tomorrow. In the past several days, programs have been held around to world to raise awareness about privacy issues. We at AT&T were delighted to take part by sponsoring and participating in a National Cyber Security Alliance forum, which was held yesterday in Washington.
As AT&T’s Chief Privacy Officer, every day is privacy day for me and my team It’s a topic we’re thinking about, talking about and acting upon on an ongoing basis. We work hard to anticipate and prepare for developments in the constantly changing world of privacy. Recently, for example, we have been focusing on instilling best privacy practices in our work with apps developers and online behavioral advertising.
At AT&T, we’ve long recognized that our privacy commitments are fundamental to the way we do business every day.
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Posted by: Bob Quinn on January 26, 2012 at 3:08 pm
“Broadband is the great infrastructure challenge of the early 21st century.”
That is the opening sentence of the National Broadband Plan, and the challenge that the Plan spends almost 400 pages trying to address. And that’s the point Sprint has ignored entirely in responding to my recent blog.
Fact: There are vast territories in rural Kansas and Oklahoma where Sprint used to offer their customers a 3G on-net broadband wireless experience where they will now rely on roaming (or, the practice of piggy-backing on competitors’ networks). Sprint may now claim that it had some type of “infrastructure” deal which it characterizes as “roaming” but that is not what Sprint proclaimed in its maps in identifying the “Sprint footprint” and it is certainly not what Sprint told its customers in the affected areas when it started selling them iPhones last year.
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