It’s between cable & telecom, and “paramount” & “tantamount”

David Lazarus in a recent Consumer Confidential column in the Los Angeles Times quotes Michael Shames of the Consumer Action Network on the “duopoly* of “two titans battling for the hearts, minds and wallets of consumers.” The two competing titans are posed as cable versus telecom, sort of like Coca Cola versus Pepsi Cola.

Lazarus writes that the three largest telecom companies: AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc., and Qwest Communications International Inc. will all “work together” in Project Movearoo.com in the interest of serving customers who may move to a new residence and require switching services among other “good intentions.” What’s the catch?

Additionally, “six leading cable companies have banded together” for the purpose of targeting ads to specific viewers, Project Canoe. ” It turns out that one group of “800 pound gorillas,” the telecom companies (mainly telephone), is competing with another group, mainly cable and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol companies like Skype and Vonage) because the telephone group is feeling the competition. Thus, the two groups are forming a duopoly which pits each against the other yet with both large groups dominating the market. This way everybody wins. This is capitalism the way you like it.

But to the subject of the day: tantamount versus paramount. “Landel Hobbs, chief operating officer of Time Warner Cable states that the goal of the cable companies is to “enhance advertising offering(s)…without compromising the privacy of our customers, which is of tantamount importance to us.” Mr. Hobbs possibly meant “paramount,” meaning of greatest importance, rather than tantamount, meaning equal to.

Hobbs is trying to tell the public through the medium of the Los Angeles Times that “protecting privacy is “most important” to his company, Time Warner. Protecting privacy cannot matter “equally” as much as the profit his company may make by dominating an industry, right? Protecting privacy is more important, right? Uh, yeah. Right. Or, does Hobbs actually mean tantamount? Should we take him at his word: “Privacy=Profit”?

paramount: adjective MOST IMPORTANT, of greatest/prime importance; uppermost, supreme, chief, overriding, predominant, foremost, prime, primary, principal, highest, main. (Concise Oxford Dictionary)

tantamount: adjective EQUIVALENT TO, equal to, as good as, more or less, much the same as, comparable to, on a par with, commensurate with,

*A true duopoly is a specific type of oligopoly where only two producers exist in one market. In reality, this definition is generally used where only two firms have dominant control over a market.