You Have to Love, Big Dumb Corporations
I saw this article on Ars Technica about an addition to AT&T’s new Terms of Service. According to the new terms what I’m about to say could get my service canceled. Well, if the last month is any indication it won’t be that big of a deal.
So at the end of August, I decided to get DSL and cancel my cable and internet service with Ygnition. Ygnition uses a Dish Network feed and I imagine their home office is a temporary building with satellite dishes halfway mounted to the side of the building.
Enough about them. So I signed up for the cheapest phone service and DSL I could get. A few days later, I was contacted that everything had been connected and was ready to go. However, my DSL was not working. So I called tech support. They walked me through all the basic steps and they couldn’t figure it out. They gave me some stupid excuse and told me to try again in a few days. A few days passed and nothing. So then I called back. This technician told me she couldn’t check my line because there was an outage. The only problem is that my DSL was not working before the outage. So the next time I called they asked me if I had a dial tone. I don’t know. I don’t own a landline. I haven’t had a landline in a year and a half. I had one in Louisiana but that was only because I had DSL there. I owned a phone but it was never plugged in because I didn’t want to get telemarketers. So I broke down and bought a phone. No dial tone.
So the technician ran a test and told me that my line had not been connected at the central office. He put in a trouble ticket. Two days later, still no dice. So the next technician told me they could send out a technician but if they had to come inside it would cost $30 for the trip and then $99 for the first half hour. I told them to send the technician but I was not going to spend another $100 for service I have been unable to use for the last month. Then he tried to sell me on the $87 package that would cover the inside repairs. The only reason I signed up for DSL is because it was $25. Why would i want to pay 4 times that. So I called back this week and they told me that if you don’t have phone service for more than 3 months then they disconnect a device in the complex phone box. So basically they break the phone so they have to charge me to fix what they broke. The technician told me that they don’t charge $99 ever for their repair work. But he couldn’t give me a hard number on the costs. I was frustrated by this point and I just want my DSL to work, so I told them to do it. So when I got home from class today, I had DSL service.
And then I listened to TWIT, Episode 115, where they also mentioned the change to the terms. According to the changes,
5.1 Suspension/Termination. … AT&T may immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Service, any Member ID, electronic mail address, IP address, Universal Resource Locator or domain name used by you, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes … (c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.
So because I just wrote about how their support is horrible and it took them a month to fix my DSL, they could terminate my service.
As Patrick Norton and the Ars Technica article pointed out, if AT&T begins down this path they are opening themselves up to a world of economic and legal issues. As an ISP, they are a safe harbor, which means they aren’t held responsible for anything illegal that their users do while online. However, if they begin restricting what goes over the lines then as Patrick Norton pointed out, they become a publishing company and lose their safe harbor status. So then if they allow copyrighted or illegal material through, then they are liable. Plus if they start disconnecting customers, they are going to face a consumer firestorm. So, go ahead AT&T. Cancel my service. I’ll take my money elsewhere and watch as the lawsuits roll in.
Net Neutrality, Tubes, Dark Fiber and the 700Mhz Spectrum
Let me first begin by briefly describing the debate over Net Neutrality.
Side A: The Major Telecommunication Companies and anyone else that has spent billions of dollars laying fiber and copper lines over which billions of bits of information flow every second. This group thinks that companies like Google, Netflix, Amazon and Apple should pay an Internet Toll for using their cables. From my understanding the toll would be based on the amount of data sent over the wires. For someone like Google, which owns YouTube and makes billions on Internet search, this toll would severely cut into their profits.
Side B: Companies like Google, Netflix, Amazon, and Apple think the wires should be open and free just like the highway infrastructure in the United States. Consumers and businesses alike are able to use the highways for personal use and commercial gain.
This story has been brewing for over a year and the remarks I will mention are from June 2006. A particular set of remarks by Senator Ted Stevens came to mind when I was attempting to explain to my mother how email worked over the network. The Internet being “a series of tubes.” I thought I’d share some of my comments about his statements and let you read and hear for yourself.
I first heard Senator Ted Steven’s remarks on Net Neutrality on This Week in Tech – Episode 60. They only played about 5 minutes of the original 11 minute recording of Senator Steven’s comments. Upon listening to his comments I agreed, and still agree with the hosts that he does not have a clear view of how technology works. As I have listened to the entire clip I have come away with a few more observations.
One, it is usually best to stop and think before speaking. From the sound of it, someone on the committee got him riled up and he proceeded to rant for 11 minutes without making any sense. Two, it’s an old proverb, “Better to be silent and to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.” Three, he seems to oscillate between the two viewpoints. He just does not make a strong argument either way. Four, this is pure speculation but listening to his comments, it feels like he is fighting for lobbyists and not the greater good of the people. In an unrelated case to Net Neutrality, Senator Stevens is under investigation by the FBI and the IRS.
In Senator Stevens’ defense, Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. wrote an article titled, Senator Stevens is Not As Dumb as He Sounds, which discusses how Senator Stevens’ concepts are not too far off.
Oddly enough, while searching through my brother’s Flickr photos, I found this great illustration of Senator Stevens’ view of the Internet. Be sure to read the captions for a complete understanding of network connectivity.
Here are some of Senator Stevens’ comments, which originally appeared on Wired.com. I will interject some of my own comments. My comments will be in bold and Senator Stevens’ will be in italics.
I just the other day got, an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
Ok, we have all sent an email to friends, family, or coworkers and it never arrived. It is not however because the Internet was clogged and needed a bottle of Drano Max. Bad cables, finicky servers, spam filters and a whole list of other reasons are to blame. Not clogged tubes.
So you want to talk about the consumer? Let’s talk about you and me. We use this Internet to communicate and we aren’t using it for commercial purposes.
We aren’t earning anything by going on that Internet. Now I’m not saying you have to or you want to discriminate against those people …
Apparently Senator Steven’s has not perused Ebay recently. There are tens of thousands of consumers using the Internet for commercial purposes. Granted, they are not using the amount of bandwidth of YouTube but Stevens’ argument is that there are just a few people using the Internet for commercial purposes. As someone that makes his living by developing web sites, I am earning money by “going on that Internet.”
They [companies like Google, Netflix, Amazon, & Apple] want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.
It’s a series of tubes.
And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
Here lies the infamous quote. There is a Wikipedia article devoted to this quote. This is where Net Neutrality comes into play. The Telcos and some members of Congress want these Internet companies to pay a toll to use “the tubes.” What they don’t understand is this will destroy the model the Internet was founded on and it completely messes with a free market system. If Google has to start paying millions of dollars in tolls, YouTube and Gmail will no longer be free. Netflix will have to do away with their on-demand video downloads. Apple’s cash cow, Itunes, will shrivel and die. They will have to charge more for song downloads and people will just go back to piracy.
Now we have a separate Department of Defense Internet now, did you know that?
Do you know why?
Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can’t afford getting delayed by other people.
I am not really sure why he threw the DOD into the mix but I’ll comment. The DOD has their separate network not because of a fear of hairy bits clogging the pipes. They have a separate network because they have classified documents they don’t want the public or foreign nations seeing.
So that is Net Neutrality in a nutshell and why we should not let the government muck with the Internet. In the end, Google may rule the world anyway. They have spent the last few years buying dark fiber around the country. Dark Fiber is fiber optic cabling that has been laid but is not in use. Many have speculated about Google’s intentions. To fuel the paranoia, in just the last few weeks, Google offered 4.6 billion dollars for the 700Mhz spectrum. This is where the old UHF
If I could get on the Internet in most any place in the country and not have to pay Starbucks or some municipal airport for access, then Viva Google.
