Putting my money where my mouth is

About six or eight months ago, ATT CEO Ed Whitacre made a few very disturbing comments about what he’d like to do with the internet.  I heard them then, I still hear them now, and it scares me.  It scares me because if his vision of the internet becomes true – where content providers not only have to pay for their bandwidth, but have to pay again for the connection to their viewers – then America’s internet will be broken.  It will no longer be a meritocracy, where a person with a good idea and some hard work can reach tens of millions of people without having to convince some corporate drone that it is a good idea.  It will no longer be a marketplace of ideas, where true market principles can apply and the devil take the hindmost.  It’ll be an information portal controlled by 3 telecommunications giants.  I’ve talked about this is in the past, and I still recommend going and reading teletruth.org.  This is not a small issue.  With almost all of our media being contolled by something like 5 entitites, the internet is the one place where truth still has a chance to be heard.  And it is being heard.  Just look at the profound effect that the internet is beginning to have on politics.  Look at the extra accountability that we have gained by bloggers attaching to stories that never make it past the John Mark Karrs and Michael Jackson crap-fests on the major networks, until the bloggers have gone out and done the real journalism.  It was bloggers who brought down Trent Lott when he revealed his racism.  Bloggers helped catch Duke Cunningham.  They are the bulldogs, and they are changing and will change American Democracy for the better.  But only if they can be reached.  Only if people don’t turn away from their sites because they’re too slow.  What Ed Whitacre wanted to do was to set it up so that if some website didn’t pay him extra to reach their viewers, than he’d just degrade the connection.  And maybe pop up a little link to some competitive site that had paid him his extortion money.  And that is an intolerable idea to me.

So today, I completed the process of putting my money where my mouth is.  I switched my internet service to speakeasy dsl, the provider recommended by the Open Source Development Labs.   They’re more expensive…almost doubly so.  But they don’t charge hidden fees (so they’re really only 1/3 more expensive or so), they give you a static IP, they do not block ports (so you can do whatever you want with your bandwidth and your static IP), they have *great* customer service…it knocks the absolute bejesus out of sbc/att.  Like you wouldn’t believe.  The dumbasses at At&T are clearly taking a page out of AOL’s book, and it took me 30 minutes just to get to the point where they’d actually let me put in the cancellation order.  They were appalled (appalled!) when I wanted to change my service provider just based on what their CEO said in a moment of weakness.  And did I know that I could get my mobile phone service on the same bill as my phone?  Wouldn’t that be great?  How much do you pay for your mobile phone service now.  Oh, we’d warn you months ahead of time if we were going to restrict your internet based on which content provider had ponied up the most cash, honest!  (Yeah…just like I got any information about that fake tax you were gonna replace the USF fee with, or those credit cards you lost and definitely ponied up on, or – well, the list just goes on and on).

Anyway, if you’ve any money to spare at all, and you believe in the sanctity and importance of the internet, you might just check out speakeasy.