Verizon, AT&T Investors Unsurprisingly Vote Down Net Neutrality Being an Anti-Competitive Jerk is Good for (Short Term) Business Back in February we noted AT&T was getting some interesting investor pressure from none other than Mike D of the Beastie Boys, who had used SEC rules to force an investor vote on whether the telco should adhere to network neutrality. As we also noted in April, it seemed highly unlikely that the investors would vote for this provision, since anti-competitively screwing the other guy (while professing to love "free markets" out of the other corner of your mouth) is generally the rule of the road. Throttling or capping a competitor's traffic and generally abusing your gatekeeper position is good for business. Well, at least your business, and at least in the short term.

quote: Open MIC executive director Michael Connor told The Hill that the vote was just the first step in educating shareholders about net neutrality. "These are multi-year efforts. It doesn't happen overnight," he said. He noted that the vote cleared the 3 percent threshold necessary to ensure the issue can appear on the ballot again next year. "For us to get the vote that we did, we found quite gratifying," he said. "We would have been happy with 4 or 5 percent. So to get above that was significant." While being an anti-competitive jerk may be good for a carrier's short term revenues, Open MIC has argued that it hurts overall innovation on the Internet, stunting potential business opportunities on every front. Still, it seems unlikely that telecom investors are going to change their stripes and develop big picture vision anytime soon. Most sector investors are so myopically short sighted, they Not too surprisingly when AT&T investors put the issue up for a vote last month it was overwhelmingly shot down to the tune of 94.1 percent against . Similarly, Verizon investors this week were also forced to vote on the issue, and fared slightly better -- with 92.1 percent voting against the measure. Open Media and Information Companies Initiative ( OpenMIC ), the organization behind the initiative, doesn't see it as a complete failure because they got enough votes to have the issue re-appear on the ballot next year While being an anti-competitive jerk may be good for a carrier's short term revenues, Open MIC has argued that it hurts overall innovation on the Internet, stunting potential business opportunities on every front. Still, it seems unlikely that telecom investors are going to change their stripes and develop big picture vision anytime soon. Most sector investors are so myopically short sighted, they whine like schoolchildren when a carrier re-invests in their own network (even if they have the cash) to keep pace with the times.







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