Apparently BellSouth is either hungry or needs a nap, cause they couldn’t be acting more like a 2 year old:

Hours after New Orleans officials announced Tuesday that they would deploy a city-owned, wireless Internet network in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, regional phone giant BellSouth Corp. withdrew an offer to donate one of its damaged buildings that would have housed new police headquarters, city officials said yesterday.

According to the officials, the head of BellSouth’s Louisiana operations, Bill Oliver, angrily rescinded the offer of the building in a conversation with New Orleans homeland security director Terry Ebbert, who oversees the roughly 1,650-member police force.

Horrible PR moves aside, the story here is BellSouth and lots of other huge companies are desparate to compete with new technology and it’s implications on their bottom line. Free WiFi over a city would seriously hurt BellSouth’s DSL/internet service.

But it’s inevitable.

As Bobby would say, they’d better start swimming or they’ll sink like a stone, cause the times, they are a-changin’.