Instead, this post is inspired by the fact that my inbox was graced, first, with this link to this story from Cisco’s newsroom describing a joint initiative with CSC eGovernance Services India, to extend medical and educational services to remote communities through “Common Service Centres.”

As explained in the release: “The Common Service Centres program is a strategic cornerstone of the government of India’s National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) with 250,000 CSCs planned across 600,000 villages.” In the bullet points that follow, there’s lots of emphasis on two specific Cisco Products WebEx on Demand, for distributing telecourses and Cisco HealthPresence for telemedicine. But with all that broadband capacity, it’s a certainty that the better educated and cared for villagers can define other applications to take advantage of connectivity and collaboration.

As the email and blogging gods would have it, the next post in my inbox carried the headline “Governments Use Internet as Tool for Control”. In it, reporter Emma Woollacott, cites a report issued today by the US Department of State which, using China as the primary culprit, claimed that governments can “monitor internet use, control content, restrict information, block access to foreign and domestic websites, encourage self-censorship, and punish those who violated regulations.”

That’s not a pretty picture, but it was one augmented by a report entitled “Enemies of the Internet” from Reporters without Borders, which lists the countries that are most abusive of the Internet’s ability to serve both public and individual needs. Burma, North Korea, Cuba, and Turkmenistan block Internet access altogether. The report adds: “For economic purposes, China, Egypt, Tunisia and Vietnam have wagered on a infrastructure development strategy while keeping a tight control over the Web’s political and social content.”

Such policies pose a real threat to the healthy growth of innovative applications on the global Internet.

To maintain its leadership the company is engaged in a number of initiatives that can only be called transformative. While it has always been a master of manipulating public policy, its lobbyists have gone the extra mile (or perhaps the “last mile”) in the past week by filing these comments proposing that the FCC develop guidelines for killing off POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) and shutting down the copper-based PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network).

On the surface, the proposal has a certain amount of internal logic. As AT&T’s lawyers explain, it is losing residential customers at an accelerating rate and, as a result, it has to raise the rates it charges remaining residential customers in order to maintain acceptable profitability. Only a monopoly sees the necessity to raise prices in the face of declining demand; and it is very easy to interpret AT&T’s pricing policy as an effort to accelerate the demise of the PSTN. Citing the FCC’s “successes” in coordinating broadcast TV’s transition to digital signals and in helping mobile carriers move from the first generation AMPS (Advanced Mobile Phone Service) to PCS and then digital PCS, it is asking for the Commission to oversee the process of establishing a date-certain for abandoning the existing phone network so that it can dedicate its resources exclusively to extending broadband links to the Internet to 100% of the nation.

As Bruce Kushnick of New Networks Institute points out here, this is a false choice and a spurious argument. There are not “two networks”, there is only one utility and, over the years AT&T and its cohort of common carriers (primarily Verizon) has been compensated for operating its networks at rates that took into account improvements and upgrades – including special funds to extend broadband to every home and business in America.

In a particular telling section of TeleTruth’s memorandum, Kushnick provides the following “reality check:

AT&T, right now has 1.7 million total U-Verse, broadband-TV capable households (AT&T 3rd/q2009). That’s it! They claimed they would have 18 million by 2007 (not counting BellSouth). AT&T now controls 22 states. If AT&T is going to walk away from the utility networks and we leave it up to AT&T to build out their ‘broadband networks’ —one-half of the US is going to be harmed.

So that’s where we’re at in Washington, DC. Policy makers have declared that it is in the national interest to extend broadband access to all the homes in the U.S. Only AT&T has proposed that the best way to do it is to walk away from its existing physical plant in favor of a yet-to-be-constructed resource. In its filing it invites interested parties to comment on the approach. I urge everyone to take an interest.

I called this “Part 1″ of our discussion of AT&T in the Age of Ma Google because managing regulators is only part of AT&T’s initiatives in this age of Ma Google and Recombinant Communication. Later today I’ll be issuing an advisory on the many initiatives launched by AT&T at CES, including support of multiple mobile operating systems, developer environments and application distribution platforms announced at the AT&T Developer Summit. It is there that AT&T showed its capacity to support Recombinant Communications development efforts.