It’s been a bit of a pet peeve of mine since we moved into our house. We are provided gas, electric, phone, and DSL service by the Denton County Electric cooperative (known as CoServ). A while back when I heard about the deregulation of the electric market, I thought, great! I can get a decent provider and shop around for the best rate (and possibly go with Green Mountain who supports renewable energy sources).

Well….it turns out I can’t switch my crappy gas service, my crappy electric service, or my crappy phone or DSL service. They all have so-so customer service (that usually only operates between the hours of 9-4 Monday through Thursday….no, I’m not joking). We have frequent phone and DSL interruptions (they’ve been a little better lately), and this past week the power has flashed out numerous times.

I wrote several letters and complained about the monopoly to my representatives, various government agencies, etc. But you see, as I’ve been informed, a cooperative isn’t a monopoly. I ‘choose’ to be a part of this group and only get service through them. I ‘choose’ not to let competitors enter my area and compete.

From the website http://www.texas-ec.org: SB 7, the restructuring bill, required all private investor-owned electric utilities to allow competitors by January 1, 2002. Cooperatives had the ‘choice’ to allow competition. Well, they wouldn’t choose that and hurt their business, right? Ah, but here’s the catch: the ‘owners’ of a cooperative are the consumers of its electricity (I ‘own’ a small % of CoServ by living here). So the people who can only get one rate on phone, DSL, electric, and gas as well as only one option on technicians and customer service ‘chose’ to not have the option to choose?

Oh, oh, I know this one…pick me…I call *BULLSHIT*! It’s kind of like if you got fed up with Microsoft Windows and tried to buy another OS and were told, ‘I’m sorry sir, but you decided as a group not to allow any other OS on your computers.’ ‘As a group?’ you ask. ‘Me and who else?’ ‘Oh, you and the board of directors of Microsoft.’

I’m sure it was a decision by our board of directors to not allow competition or some corporate/political/legal crap like that. Anyway, as you can tell I’m a little annoyed by it. I’ve always thought a monopoly in the U.S. was illegal. And to me, a monopoly is when only one provider supplies a type of product or service to a consumer or group of consumers, even when there are other suppliers who could and would compete.

But, silly me. A rose is a rose by another name, except for when it’s a cooperative!