CPUC is absolutely awful. Every time I see the acronym, my spidey sense tingles like crazy that there's some collusion going on behind the scenes. Those people fold in places that are strategically very convenient for the industries. It very much seems like CPUC is in the business of monopoly-building, and I have never seen any evidence to the contrary. Specifically CPUC makes me wish I ran a watchdog and could dump resources into an investigation.
They were the ones that decided that frontier buying Verizon Fios wouldn't cause any harm to consumers, and what do you think happened... Yeah, lots of complaints about billing mistakes, months of no service, etc.
Yeah, that was one of the most painful acquisitions for me personally. I went from practically no issues with Fios for years, and at least reasonably responsive service if there was an issue, to literally the worst customer service i've ever dealt with in Frontier. The billing issues... oh the billing issues were terrible. They were charging me more than double for three months, each month i'd call and tell them to fix it and fix the prior months, and I wasn't paying until I saw a fixed statement with the correct amount owed. It didn't get fixed until 4 months in I filed a complaint with the BBB.
It was a bad transition, but there was no regulatory reason to block it. If Verizon had been trying to sell to Time Warner or Comcast, which would have reduced ISP choice for many people to one provider, then there is a regulatory role.
You call a "bad transition," but is that just the PR line or has the anti-consumer behavior actually stopped?
>there was no regulatory reason to block it
That's a problem, no? If protecting consumers from harm isn't a reason that empowers them to block it, the commission is broken.
"The CPUC serves the public interest by protecting consumers and ensuring the provision of safe, reliable utility service and infrastructure at just and reasonable rates, with a commitment to environmental enhancement and a healthy California economy." http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/
CPUC can't predict how well a transition like this will happen and they can't ban all telecom sales because service might be temporarily disrupted. You would be worse off long term stuck with Verizon if they were actively trying to get out of the market. They had already killed all new investment in FIOS years ago.
There's that "transition" line again. Still nothing to back up the idea that it's a temporary situation rather than the "new normal." Or more accurately the "new low."
>they can't ban all telecom sales because service might be temporarily disrupted
All? Of course not. But banning ones that create monopolistic / oligopolistic situations in certain markets (the predictable effects of which are higher prices and worse service, including more frequent interruptions of service) is warranted.
In a hypothetical universe where all possible mergers would result in monopolies / oligopolies (and are therefore blocked), that's a feature not a bug.
In this case they could have based on prior frontier acquisitions from Verizon. When they first announced it I googled them (because I thought they were an airline and that made no sense) and the first things that came up were about how bad the transition was elsewhere.
Businesses haven't been sitting on their hands, they've been busy "capturing" regulatory agencies at every level of government via their control of the officials who appoint to them.
