Author: Michael Pellegrini
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To be, or not to be…
This current presidential election will be perhaps the single most important event the United States has faced in a hundred or more years. Never before has there been such a wide range and disparity between the different candidates. Never before has there been so much at stake. This is where we decide if we’re a…
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The West Coast ports disaster and the blame game
Originally printed in the Journal of Commerce – February 13, 2015 Opinion, by Michael Pellegrini So the ILWU is solely responsible for the humongous mess our West Coast ports are in? It must be so because I read it in the Journal of Commerce. My first concern is that perhaps this blame is misplaced. To…
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Click! Networks should get out of the cable TV business
There’s been a discussion lately about the viability of Click. It seems the Cable TV business is losing money – in part through the rising costs of programming content, and partially because of the way the city cooks their books, writing off capital construction costs of the network. The wholesale internet business – where Click…
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Another Love Letter to Marguerite Reardon…
C-Net’s Maggie Reardon wrote another PR-release, fluff piece for Comcast on the issue of the Comcast-Netflix peering/extortion issue. In this supposed, “learned” explanatory piece, Ms. Reardon details all the thousand reasons Comcast embodies all that is goodness and right and how NetFlix is a horrible bandwidth hog, free-lunch expectant monster! Yeah, right. Here’s the piece: C-Net article:…
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FCC’s Net Neutrality Rules Would Break the Internet
C-Net’s Marguerite Reardon’s at it again, with a new piece on the goodness of the FCC’s proposed rules on “Open Internet.” http://www.cnet.com/news/fccs-position-on-net-neutrality-hasnt-changed/ She spends the whole article mouthing soothing platitudes from the talking points Comcast prepared for her. I can’t believe anyone is so stupid as to believe these rules won’t terribly harm consumers. So…
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Comcast – Time Warner Cable Merger Is Bad News For Consumers
Marguerite Reardon of C-Net wrote an opinion piece suggesting the Comcast-TWC merger would be a good thing. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57620361-93/why-a-comcast-merger-could-be-good-for-twc-customers/ I wrote the following response: Maggie Reardon has obviously sold her soul to Comcast. Her opinion piece is an embarrassment. It looks like most of it was copied verbatim from a Comcast press release. I’ve never…
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Bank of America Screws Its Small Customers
All your money are belong to us… You think Bank America really cares about its customers? In mid-August, B of A notified me that there’d been a breech of data with some retailer I do business with, and because of that, they were issuing me a new debit card. A couple days later, I got…
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Big Brother Is Watching You!
It’s 1984 in 2013 – Welcome to Oceania! “…Americans have learned that the National Security Agency has been spying on Americans without judicial approval. We learned about this not from the Administration, but from the New York Times and USA Today. Every time a revelation came out, President Bush refused to answer questions from Congress……
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Click! Network Moves to Put Independant ISP’s Out of Business
After years of operating in blissful ignorance of the markets they allegedly compete in, Click! has come to the conclusion that they’re in trouble and have to do something, and do it quick! The fact that they haven’t upgraded their system to DOCSIS 3.0 – like Comcast did three years ago isn’t to blame. The…
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SOPA – Creating New Union Jobs? Naw…
I was surprised when I saw that the AFL-CIO was backing SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act sponsored by the RIAA and MPAA. I was able to find out the name of the AFL-CIO official, Paul Almeida, testifying for the bill, and I sent him and email. Below follows that exchange. To: Paul Almeida From:…