I love what I do best. I love what I do best. The only thing I learned from the past is that I don’t like to work for free. I like to work for what I want to get paid for. And the only way to get paid for something is by making it. So I get paid for what I like to do the best.
The way I think of it is that if you are going to have a job, you need to have something you are good at. Your best skill might be making widgets but if you don’t like the job you are doing, you need to find something else you like.
I think it goes back to the days when we were not allowed to work for free. It was illegal to farm in America before the Civil War. It was illegal to build telephone poles, roads, dams, and other structures in the United States. At that time, you could earn your keep in the form of a day’s work in a foundry.
Back then, there was something called the Hours Act, which made it illegal to work more than 40 hours a week. It was very much a labor-intensive industry like many others in the 19th century. In the 1880s, the Hours Act was repealed. Now it is illegal to work more than eight hours a day even if you are a full time employee.
In 1986, Congress passed the Telecommunications Act, which created the FCC to regulate the telephone industry. It was the first time that FCC oversight was allowed to reach into the private sector. Since then, the FCC has been investigating phone companies and their practices. In 2010, the FCC ruled that all of AT&T’s phone service was in violation of the law.
In 2006, AT&T, the nation’s largest telecommunications provider, was fined $50 million for misleading customers about how much data they could purchase for free over the internet. In 2011, The Department of Justice sued AT&T for violations of the Anti-Kickback Statute, which bans companies from paying for referrals to customers without compensation.
We’re now in the process of filing cases against ATampT for the last of the anti-kickback violations. ATampT’s new CEO, Keith Bostic, is a staunch opponent of the law. The ATampT phone service is so cheap, it’s almost like they’ve taken the FCC and simply ripped it off.
Although he’s only a little more than half a year into his new job, Bostic is already seeing the end of their anti-kickback case coming. In particular, he’s concerned that carriers are beginning to use a program called “Topside Creeper.” They use this program to share the call data of customers with other companies in the same market.
Topside Creeper is a big deal in the mobile phone industry for a couple reasons. First of all, it gives the carrier the ability to track which users are talking to each other. This is a big issue for AT&T (they even have a privacy policy for their customers to read) and the FCC has been working with carriers to limit the use of it.
Topside Creeper is a key feature of the carrier’s new offering of “Mobile Hotspot,” which lets you share your phone number with other companies so that they can call you, text you, and send you SMSs.