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• Monday, June 9, 2008 03:24 PM

  Man is Comcast stupid--predictably

  Organizations in the position that Comcast is in--i.e. having aided and abetted in knowing and egregious lawbreaking (with respect to the warrantless surveillance programs), and fearful of being held responsible for it--invariably do the absolutely worst thing possible by going into full-on denial, obstruct and stonewall mode, which invariably comes back to haunt them. Because not only did they break the original law in question, FISA, but now they're compounding this by breaking other, secondary but just as serious laws, having to do with censorship and license violation (I don't know the laws surrounding this but my understanding is that telcoms do NOT have the right to censor content based solely on political value, nor to deliberately misrepresent what is obviously politically-motivated censorship by lying about it).

  I think that Comcast is just setting itself up for serious legal action against it--civil for now, and if Obama wins, criminal--that could actually cost it the vast sums of money that it falsely claims current lawsuits against it could cost it, if not its license itself. What we might be looking at here is AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, etc., all but begging the government to clamp down hard on them and break up their monopolies. That would take years, but I think it's going to happen--for other, unrelated reasons as well, of course--and this just might be the proverbial straw that broke this camel's back. Mukasey's obviously not going to take this anywhere, and civil suits could take years to unfold. But Comcast just committed a very serious mistake, I believe, by setting itself up for serious legal action down the line.

  Screw tort reform. What we need is MORE tort, not less, against such corporations.

  —kovie Read kovie's other letters
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