Under Whitacre, SBC has raised a few complaints of its own, using the courts to take on the FCC and derail some of the telecom reform decisions the carrier found too onerous.

This bad faith behavior is a serious problem for legislators. You see, Whitacre is simply going to disobey what he doesn’t want to obey, and put political and legal pressure everywhere he can. Cutting deals with his side doesn’t make sense, since they’ll take what they like and advocate against the rest. Whitacre’s attitude is also stridently anti-competitive and dishonest. For instance, there’s this famous interview where he talks about internet regulation:

How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google, MSN, Vonage, and others?

How do you think they’re going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

The Internet can’t be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! (YHOO ) or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!

Ed Whitacre is of course lying. Those aren’t ‘his pipes’. They belong to the shareholders of his company. And Google and Yahoo and every web site operator aren’t using ‘his pipes’ for free, they pay a lot of money in bandwidth for the privilege of putting lots of content on the internet. What Whitacre means is that web content companies shouldn’t be allowed to operate without paying him a toll, but that’s different from asserting they don’t pay anything. That is a lie.

But I found the most revealing aspect of Whitacre’s character to reside in his answer to this question on regulation in a Businessweek interview.

The cable companies have an agreement with the cities: They pay a percentage of their revenue for a franchise right to broadcast TV. We have a franchise in every city we operate in based on providing telephone service.Now, all of a sudden, without any additional payment, the cable companies are putting telephone communication down their pipes and we’re putting TV signals. If you want us to get a franchise agreement for TV, then let’s make the cable companies get a franchise for telephony.

If cable can put telephone down their existing franchise I should be able to put TV down my franchise. It’s kind of a “what’s fair is fair” deal. I think it’s just common sense.

It’s not common sense, it’s excessive regulation. What Whitacre is saying is remarkable. Whitacre doesn’t want his company to compete on a level playing field; he’s actively lobbying for hobbling other industries to his company’s level. This is inefficient economic behavior, and should not be encouraged.

You see, Whitacre isn’t in favor of free markets, he’s in favor of a political advantage for his company’s profit margins. Cable TV coming to eat his lunch? No problem, let’s get the government to regulate the problem away. Internet VOIP challenging his company’s business model? No problem, let’s get the government to regulate the problem away. American entrepreneurs generating wealth off the open and free internet with no innovation coming from the telcos? No problem, let’s get the government to allow the telcos to privately tax the wealth without having to do anything.

Ed Whitacre is everything that’s wrong with American business. Dishonest. Cowardly. Anti-competitive. Anti-innovation. Anti-market. It’s no wonder that America is 16th in broadband penetration.