Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Brookfield Joins the Greed Club, Sues AT&T

Not that it's any surprise, given their lusting over the Town's tax base on Bluemound Road...

Brookfield will join a consortium of suburbs that will help Milwaukee sue AT&T to provide a cable franchise agreement for its Internet protocol video service.

Brookfield aldermen voted unanimously Tuesday night to help fund the legal costs to have the Regional Telecommunications Commission intervene in a federal lawsuit the City of Milwaukee filed last month against AT&T. The RTC comprises 32 municipalities from southeastern Wisconsin.

Milwaukee and the suburbs are demanding that AT&T make annual payments to municipalities for its new service, a 200-plus-channel service dubbed "U-Verse." Time Warner Cable makes such payments under its longstanding franchise agreements.

But AT&T argues that its new system does not meet the definition of cable television. The company has agreed to pay the municipalities the same revenue offered by Time Warner; however, it will not enter into a franchise agreement.

Brookfield is not making noise about the "traffic hazard" posed by the AT&T boxes, (several of which are already up in this suburb.) They are not unhappy that AT&T will "redline" them because Brookfield residents cannot afford the service.

They just want to screw the ratepayer-citizens in the same way that they're screwing the Warner Cable ratepayer-citizens.

In other words, Show Me the (Guaranteed) Money.

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