Susan P. Crawford > Quotes

“The ownership and operation of municipal light plants stands upon a different basis from that of the ownership of water works, with which it is so often compared. Water is a necessity to the health and life of every individual member of a community. … It must be supplied in order to preserve the public health, whether it can be done profitably or not, and must be furnished, not to a few individuals, but to every individual. Electric lights are different. Electricity is not in any sense a necessity, and under no conditions is it universally used by the people of a community. It is but a luxury enjoyed by a small proportion of the members of any municipality, and yet if the plant be owned and operated by the city, the burden of such ownership and operation must be borne by all the people through taxation.17”
― Susan P. Crawford, Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age

“By cooperating, Verizon Wireless is implicitly promising that the FiOS service will spread no farther; Comcast and Time Warner, for their part, are implicitly promising that they will not go into the wireless business.”
― Susan P. Crawford, Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age