Yes It’s True: Internet, cable, phone look like monopolies

I first learned what a monopoly is (besides a board game) while in seventh grade in a half-semester class on Michigan history.

The dictionary describes it as: “a company or group having exclusive control over a commodity or service.”

The teacher explained it with an example — If Standard Oil (later Amoco and then BP) and another, smaller company, such as Cavalier Oil, were in the same town and Standard went on a campaign to lower the price of gas to one penny a gallon indefinitely, it could run Cavalier out of business because its wealth would allow it to withstand the lost revenue with low price. Once the process was completed, Standard would be able to set whatever price it wants because it would have no local competition.

It was unfair practices such as these that prompted Republican President Theodore Roosevelt to use the power of his office to break up monopolies and trusts. Yes, you read that right, a Republican intervened into the “free market” like a referee to make certain the game was being played fairly.

Yet in the more than a century since Roosevelt left office, we have seen the return of behemoth firms dominating their markets — companies such as Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft and closer to home, cable television providers.

I was keenly aware of this unpleasant development when I set about examining my family’s “Triple Play” bundle with Charter/Spectrum. Having this company provide our land-line telephone service, cable television and Internet costs us just shy of $200 a month.

I watch eyes glaze over when I tell younger people that I can remember when TV cost a family nothing after you bought the set and hooked up the antenna. To be sure, we had to put up with commercial advertising, but a lot less of it. And the number of channels available to us was much smaller.

So in today’s modern now-a-go-go society, we don’t pay long distance for the phone, we get pretty fast Internet service and we get more than a couple hundred TV stations.

The problem with cable TV, however, is that we’re getting a vast quantity of channels we don’t want and will never watch. We pay for them, regardless.

Cable companies make plenty of coin charging these “orphan” religious and shopping channels for including them in the lineup made available to customers.

This led me to ask why cable providers don’t give customers the a la carte option, letting us pay only for programming we want. The answer was “There ain’t nothin’ you can do about it.”

I didn’t think that was fair, given that my family pays almost $200 a month, more than $2,000 annually, much of it for stuff we don’t even want.

So I began to research other options for cable, phone and Internet and learned quickly that it was either Spectrum or Direct TV, the latter of which I have heard little good about. I’ve also learned that it’s actually more expensive to lose the land line in favor of a cell phone.

My daughter, who is a lot more tech savvy than I, suggested You Tube TV, but remember that my family gets the triple play, so what about Internet and telephone? I asked her about getting programming from the major networks, plus college basketball and football, much of which serves as the reason we have cable at all.

It is a difficult journey when trying to determine what else a common family of three can get. You would think that with the miracle of the Internet and instant communication we could somehow secure a phone, cable TV and Internet combo that we actually want rather than what they will allow us.

I’ve heard stories about customers calling Spectrum to raise hell and getting their rates reduced by a paltry amount. I’ve heard stories about customers who have gone to the satellite dish. I’ve heard stories about those who have taken the drastic option of cutting the cord altogether.

I’m still examining options, but I can’t get over that nasty saying I came across not long ago — “Nine-seven channels and nothin’s on.”