Verizon: We'll "Turn The World Upside Down"

Verizon's chief flack, in an interview with Business Week, claims the telco is a leader in innovation, an "insurgent" deploying technology to change the world. What a joke! This company couldn't innovate its way out of a paper bag. Thomas J. Tauke, Verizon's executive vice-president for public affairs, offered Business Week the usual lies about why the company opposes network neutrality. He claims, "We are the insurgents who are trying to come in and change the marketplace."

Tauke goes on to say, "What we have been attempting to do as a company is to turn the world upside-down."

Of course, he was unable to mention a single innovation pioneered by Verizon. In fact, in the only detail offered in the piece, he showed that Verizon stood full square against innovation, by opposing the rights of municipalities to create their own wireless networks.

As I've written about in a previous blog, telcos like Verizon are technological dinosaurs who offer no innovation. They're all about flackery, marketing, and pure political muscle, and little else.

Here's one more piece of evidence why that's true. What background does Tauke, Verizon's Flack-in-Chief, have? Here's a man who talks about innovation, and being an "insurgent". One might expect that he would have some kind of technical background.No, instead Tauke was a six-term Congressman. That's about as far from innovation and insurgency as you're going to get. Case closed.