""I have never seen an independent… start up without having to fight the incumbent legally," Patten told Ars. "The incumbents are notorious for frivolous delay lawsuits. They know perfectly well they're frivolous, but it's a delay tactic. They have an army of lawyers and a budget to support lawsuits the size of Godzilla. That's one of their tactics, it always has been. It probably will continue to be so for many years yet to come."
That's what happened to fiber ISP Falcon Broadband in Colorado Springs. The company started in 2003, competing against Adelphia, Falcon's former engineering chief Michael Wagner said.
"They did not want anybody else to come into their territory because they wanted to have that monopoly with their franchise agreements," Wagner told Ars. "What they started to do was file frivolous lawsuit after lawsuit to try to basically bankrupt us so we couldn't compete."
Wagner recalled about 10 lawsuits from Adephia, and later Comcast, who took over Adelphia's operations in 2006.
"We've had lawsuits that we were tampering with their equipment; we had lawsuits that we were violating different FCC requirements for the cable plants," he said. "We had lawsuits that we were not honoring different content contractual obligations and that we were doing unfair practices, basically, in the franchising cable agreements."
These kinds attorneys are here to help you lighten the load on your wallet.
Most of the suits "were either thrown out right away, or they didn't pursue it. It was mostly just to make make us spend $400 dollars an hour on lawyers," Wagner said.
... and if the FCC, FTC or anyone else was truly serious about Free Market enterprise, competition, and innovation this is exactly what needs to be shut down, and shut down hard. It would be easy to do, as well. Just pass a law that makes Godzilla-like penalties for filing these bogus lawsuits, so that they would quit doing it.
