Verizon, the second-largest phone network in the U.S., and the second-largest wireless operator, has decided it will no longer offer Internet service.
The question is what the Internet and its users will do in response (if anything).
The company's decision was made public this week in the form of a unilateral halt to all deliveries of e-mail from Europe by default based on a claim this is an anti-spam measure.
The claim is laughable since far more spam traffic moves from the U.S. to Europe than the other way around, thanks to real European statutes requiring opt-in and the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act, which legalized many types of spam.
But there is a larger point.
An Internet Service Provider, by definition, provides service to the entire Internet. This is usually put in the fine print of Internet service contracts. Will Verizon now modify its contracts, or simply ignore them?
It would seem to this reporter that the arrogant assumptions of Verizon Wireless, which claims it can control what users do and what they access with their mobile phones, has now filtered into the general corporate space.
And, again, the question arises -- what will be done about it?
If there is no class-action suit filed against this by the end of the week I will be greatly surprised.
I've been expecting this for a while now. This is my big fear with Comcast and Verizon and their ilk. These companies love control and that is antithetical to the Internet. To make things worse there are many people who do not wish to be exposed the Internet and even some who do not wish anyone to be exposed. Now this would all be fine if there were readily available alternatives to the big boys. Then I could have my Internet and others could have their AOL-like service. We could even meet where the two overlapped. I can only hope their are enough people who actually want access to the Internet to support competition to the big boys or force them to still offer the service.
Permalink to CommentOK, wait a minute. This doesn't pass the smell test. An ISP didn't just wholesale block Europe. Dana, have you looked into what has really happened here? Do you have any friends who use Verizon Internet?
For starters, at the surface, they did not censor the Internet. They did censor e-mail. E-mail is facilitated by a service called SMTP that runs on top of the Internet. Second, Verizon has a service called Spam Detector which users can turn on and off and even direct detected spam to a folder where they can review it. Perhaps Verizon put a blanket rule in its Spam Detector product. That in itself may be a bonehead move, but it says that Verizon is sloppy as a mail administrator, not as an ISP. From where you usually come from Dana being anti-monopoly and all that, you should be encouraged by this. Verizon is good at delivering bits, not good at delivering mail. So users might get mail from .mac, google, yahoo, hotmail, or a plethora of other free and paid e-mail services.
Sloppy, yes. Crisis, no.
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