Drumming up merger opposition

W ho is Jamie Love, and what's his beef with Microsoft, WorldCom and MCI?

Denizens of various newsgroups already know part of the answer. James Love, who calls himself Jamie, is a Washington, D.C. policy wonk who heads the Consumer Project on Technology, Ralph Nader's vehicle for IT issues.

Recently, Love has been all over town - and all over the Internet - complaining about Microsoft's bundling practices and the proposed WorldCom/MCI merger. His modus operandi in these two seemingly unrelated controversies has been the same. In addition to handling legal filings and online advocacy, Love has organized conferences that wind up being dominated by these companies' opponents, ostensibly because the companies being attacked won't show up.

True to form, the recent conference to examine the "threat" posed to the Internet backbone by the WorldCom/MCI merger began as an objective look at the deal. But it turned into a bashing session, with Love proving to be a passionate opponent of the merger.

So I was surprised when I called Love the next week and he calmly told me that he originally hadn't planned to do much with this issue because the case against Microsoft and other antitrust matters were taking up most of his time.

Love told me the conference was actually paid for by the conference's other co-sponsor _ the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the telecom industry's main labor union.

"We were kind of shamed into doing it by Debbie Goldman at the CWA," Love said, referring to the union's point person on the merger.

Now, supposedly, most of the merger opposition is due to fear that WorldCom's constituent companies could corral the Internet backbone and make interconnection with other providers unaffordable. Even much of this opposition seems to tie back to CWA.

It was the CWA that called up a Utah Internet service provider general manager who happens to be a political activist and, as we recently reported, got her to try to sign up other ISPs in an antimerger backlash.

Union funding also appears to be behind a ham-handed attempt to put an academic gloss on the merger opposition. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a Washington, D.C. think tank that receives funding from unions and foundations, recently released two reports dealing with the merger called "Monopoly.com" and "Bad Deal of the Century."

Monopoly.com cites mathematical formulas traditionally used by antitrust experts to show that the merger would probably constitute an anticompetitive concentration of power. But its author, Jeff Keefe, is a Rutgers University associate professor who specializes in labor issues and concedes that this was a new area for him. "I'm not an antitrust expert," he told me. Nevertheless, he was asked to do the study by an old contact at EPI.

CWA hasn't had much success unionizing MCI facilities, and cost-obsessed WorldCom is hostile to unions. It's good to know the CWA is suddenly fascinated by the inner workings of the Internet. How much of this interest is genuine is another question.