“Tell Sean I want to see him this evening, have a drink over at the Copley about six or seven.” The next citizen was an old woman who was wearing her Sunday go-to-Mass clothes, including a feathered blue bonnet and white gloves. She brought a plate of chocolate chip cookies she’d baked herself, and they were good. She surprised Mahoney when she said she wanted to talk about how Comcast had a monopoly on Internet service in Boston and kept jacking up their rates and forcing people to bundle services to get a decent price. She said the Internet ought to be a public utility like sewer and water, and that poor people—because of that demon Comcast—had to go to a library to get online to look for a job or apply for one. She wanted to know why Mahoney didn’t give that wimp who ran the FCC a kick in the pants, a guy who, according to her, was basically on Comcast’s payroll. Mahoney pointed out that the FCC had just blocked a merger between Comcast and Time Warner to prevent Comcast from dominating the market but the old lady said that didn’t do a damn thing for cities like Boston where Comcast already had a monopoly.
