Sleepycatz

Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

I have written several times in the past about AT&T’s questionable treatment of content in order to further their own business agenda. Now comes word that AT&T is officially enshrining their policies in their Terms of Service agreement with AT&T users. As Slashdot reported a few days ago, the updated ToS includes the following terms:

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 (a) violates the Acceptable Use Policy; (b) constitutes a violation of any law, regulation or tariff (including, without limitation, copyright and intellectual property laws) or a violation of these TOS, or any applicable policies or guidelines, or (c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.

The breadth of this statement is amazing. As AT&T partners with the Chinese government, would it now be a violation of an AT&T service agreement to criticize the Chinese government? Could one have their DSL connection terminated for publicly questioning their telephone bill?

The AT&T apologists and defenders immediately jumped on this change of the ToS, claiming, once again, that this is obviously an over-reaching mistake by some middle manager, and that, under common-carrier laws, the ToS is unenforceable and would be struck down in court. My response to these people, the same one’s who claimed the Pearl Jam incident was simply an over-reaction by a middle manager, is to ask: how many of these anti-consumer actions does it take constitute evidence of a subtle or general anti-consumer corporate policy? one?, three?, twelve?, twenty? Let me know an I will assemble the requisite documentation. As to the issue of common-carrier regulations, commentators are correct that under those regulations AT&T must remain neutral to general content. However, it is most likely that should push come to shove that AT&T will claim itself to be a Media Organization not held to common-carrier standards. After all, no one would expect Viacom to carry content which damaged their brands, why should AT&T?

There are a number of people whom I respect who disagree with me on the issue of Net Neutrality. Most of them believe that market forces will respond and correct any anti-consumer moves by Internet providers. I believe this would be true, if there existed diverse competition in the marketplace. The problem remains that a very few number of large carriers control last mile access to the Internet. Among these carriers there is little geographic competition, except in major urban centers. Opponents of neutrality site RF distribution as a way to alleviate this problem. However, given the FCC’s recent rulings on the spectrum auctions it seems most likely that the same large companies which control hardline distribution will end up in control of the RF spectrum as well. As congress has done very little to mitigate media and telecommunications consolidation, and will certainly not address this issue in the near future, the only solution left is to impose a Network Neutrality law upon Internet carriers. It is the only solution left for an industry which appearing more and more monopolistic every day is not afraid to flex it muscles on content control.

This entry was posted by steve on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 11:37 am and is filed under Injustices, Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.