Thread by @doctorow

Aaron Epstein is a 90 year old who lives a couple miles from me in North Hollywood. He's been an AT&T customer since 1960 and holy shit, is he ever DONE WITH THEIR SHIT.

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Epstein gets 3mbps (nominal)/1.5 mbps (actual) from AT&T, in the heart of the entertainment industry's company town, where the studios are serviced by a 100gb fiber loop built at public expense (it passes under my house's foundation slab).

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Like all of us in this part of LA, Epstein is not able to access this publicly funded fiber, because his city has given monopoly franchises to AT&T and Charter, two of the most despicable monopoly companies in America.

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AT&T and Charter have absorbed billions - BILLIONS - in public subsidy to build out fast networks, and instead, they've gone on shopping sprees, buying up companies and running them into the ground, showering execs with money, and screwing over their workers.

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Epstein took out quarter-page ads in the Manhattan and Dallas editions of the @WSJ excoriating AT&T CEO John Stankey (salary: $22.5m) for his failure to do literally the only thing anyone wants his company to do: provide fast broadband.

https://twitter.com/raju/status/1356958555824414721

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In @arstechnica, @jbrodkin speaks with Epstein, who sounds like a really excellent fellow, about the many frustrations he faces in his home and business with broadband from the cable/DSL duopoly.

arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…

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"Epstein said he pays AT&T about $100 a month at home for two phone lines and Internet service and $49 a month to Charter for cable Internet. Epstein also pays AT&T for phone and Internet service at a business he owns in Sherman Oaks."

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And Brodkin found a spokesweasel from AT&T to comment on Epstein's letter. The anonymous spox provided the following drivel for publication: "We continually enhance and invest in our wireless and wireline networks."

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ETA: It turns out that Mr Epstein is a goddamned legend and hero. He's from an impressive lineage, part of the "Pickwick Books" Epsteins, a legendary Hollywood bookstore founded by Russian immigrant Louis Epstein in 1938:

latimes.com/archives/la-xp…

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But Mr Epstein isn't just descended from greatness - he attained greatness in his own right. In 1999, he won a critical lawsuit that ended the corrupt practice of running Business Improvement Districts through "Property Owner Associations" not subject to sunshine laws.

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The risible pretense that these were not local government bodies allowed BIDs to operate unaccountably, making significant changes to municipal policy under cover of darkness.

michaelkohlhaas.org/wp/2014/10/30/…

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Epstein sued the City of LA all the way to the Appellate Division, where the court actual mocked the City lawyers for their idiotic arguments, calling them the "The 'We Said We Didn’t "Create" the POA, So You Can’t Decide We Did'" gambit.

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As @DotKohlhaas wrote of the lawsuit, "Without Epstein’s pioneering work, BIDs wouldn’t have been known to be subject to the Brown Act and the California Public Records Act."

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