FCC, but in the town halls of 950 different munici- palities, ranging from Boston, Atlanta, and Los Angles to Multnomah County, Oregon, and Skokie, Illinois. Cable franchise agreements gen- erally cannot be transferred without local approval. The way AT&T's lawyers read the law, a locality could challenge a transfer only if the new franchisee were of dubious character or financial means. AT&T had not reached that point yet. TCI's lawyers, who were more used to dealing with local politicians, knew that at least some of those politi- cians would see the merger as a golden opportunity to renegotiate the franchises. The same thought occurred to George Vrandenberg, AOL's wily chief counsel. AOL was the world's leading online services company. However, its service operated at relatively low data speeds and thus could not easily accommodate the streaming audio and video applications that were becoming common on the Internet. Cable TV systems, of course, could provide that bandwidth, and several cable companies had cre- ated their own high-speed Internet service, AtHome, and given it ex- clusive rights to use their cables for online content. AOL feared that without access to those cable lines, its membership numbers not only would stall but could actually be surpassed by AtHome's numbers. Vrandenberg saw an opportunity to hoist AT&T by its own petard. Why shouldn't AOL have the same "equal access" to AT&T's cable lines that AT&T was seeking on the Bells' local telephone lines? And to make the argument seem less self-serving, he helped create a coali- tion of like-minded companies to carry the question around not only within the Beltway, but into town halls across the country, or at least those where AT&T and TCI would be applying for franchise transfers. Don't Confuse Politics and Public Relations Called the "Open-Net Coalition," the membership included America Online, MCI WorldCom, and a number of smaller Internet service providers such as MindSpring Enterprises and Prodigy. The group hired a former chief staffer to Vic