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Comment by choppaface | Hacker News Reader

The AT&T app and website are so bad it takes way longer than 1 minute to log in to e.g. pay your bill. The United States needs to raise the bar for large-cap negligent operators and fine the company enough to make shareholders listen.

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In approximately 100% of cases, if your intuition is to say "this company is too large should be fined/regulated more," what you should actually say is "this company is too large and should be broken into many smaller entities."

Or nationalize parts of it, as has been done for electricity, water, and the courts.

I understand the desire to push for this but I also know first hand it would make things worse specifically around competency. I've had countless calls and meetings with state and federal agencies that could not grasp even the simplest of technical issues and this was with the very people charged with the responsibility for their systems. On the state level, explaining to the California DMV repeatedly that they may not use RC1918 address space in public MX records and expect emails and faxes to get through. That was an actual battle. Or arguing and escalating with 3 letter federal agencies that we will not "install their server certs" on our tens of thousands of servers and they must install the intermediate certs correctly. I wish I could share who that was because nobody would believe me... There are countless battles I've had with these agencies. I do not want more of these people running critical and sensitive systems. It's bad enough that leaders in companies like AT&T bend over backwards to just hand over data to them. I've had to hand over the data, looking the other way, giving unfettered unlimited unmonitored access to mainframes without warrants. This was at a company that was gobbled up by AT&T. Or being told to let a scammer with access to an SS7 link scam infinite people because they are paying for the link. Governments running these systems would be the wolves running the hen-house.

We should break down AT&T. Oh wait. We tried already and re-consolidated? Ow.

Part of breaking them up is supposed to be not letting them re-consolidate. Mergers involving any entity that already has 15% market share should just be flatly disallowed.

This is not the AT&T Judge Harry Greene broke up. This AT&T is a roll up of most of the RBOCs the breakup created.

Yes, a man never steps in the same river twice.

Not really the point though, is it.

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