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Doctorow Tears Up ISP Contract Over Net Neutrality
Burz writes "As a reaction to Virgin Media CEO's promise to violate the concept of net neutrality, Cory Doctorow is declaring his ISP contract void, canceling the service, and calling on other Virgin customers to do the same. He isn't alone. Charlie Stross counts the ways the gang that became Virgin Media is trashing Sir Richard's brand. Myself, I am thinking of stopping my Virgin Mobile service in protest."
Meh. Can't hold a job. Can't get a degree. I may or may not be kidding about this.
That really is the issue here. You're never, ever going to get enough people to dump an individual ISP over this sort of thing to make their brass go, "Whoa! We'd better not do that!". The issue is simply too involved for the 'average' net user to really understand well enough to care about.
Some things require legislative solutions, and this is clearly one of those things. While I'm not saying that users of Virgin Media *shouldn't* change providers, it should be recognized that it's nothing but a symbolic step. If you really want to see this sort of nonsense avoided, contributing to the EFF might be a far better use of money.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Don't be surprised. Wikipedia has articles on a lot of things you, specifically, haven't heard of.
If you can't convince enough customers to switch providers, perhaps that is a sign that the issue is not as dire as you think.
I'm always annoyed when people jump straight to the legislative "solution". Get the word out, start web sites, educate people. If the populace is ignorant about the problem then remove their ignorance.
These companies love making money above everything else. There are still enough choices left that you can make them realize that the way to make money is to be a good citizen. If they all band together to be evil together then it's time to start looking at legislation, but until that time you should at least try to fight them through other means.
And I should note that if the general public doesn't care about your issue then your chances of getting laws passed about it are slim to nil anyway, so the same techniques serve both purposes.
Of course if your purpose is just to whine on slashdot about how Something Must Be Done then you don't need any popular support at all.
If you lived here in California, you could take Virgin to Small Claims Court. No attorneys, just you, the company rep, a judge and a claim for less than $7,000. I've used the court twice to resolve, in my favor, similar kinds of screwups.
Perhaps you have a similar court in England?
Why do I care? Am I supposed to be impressed that submitter is "considering stopping [his] Virgin Mobile service in protest"? On my way to work today, I considered pushing a fisherman off the bridge so that I could giggle whilst watching him splash about in the water -- it's a far cry from doing it.
Pass.
Here's a solution for the legislation-hungry out there: pass some legislation to limit the efforts and effectiveness of professional lobbyist groups. Then maybe you and I would have a chance of getting heard when we wrote to our representatives.
I doubt you have a contract with Boing Boing agreeing that they will not censor reader comments, and I doubt that you are paying them all that much.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Is this a case of Wikipedia vandalism, or does his insatiable attention-whoring extend to ruining his poor daughter's life?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Public apathy does not mean that an issue isn't worth fighting for. Fortunately, we're set up as a republic for just such an emergency.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
"..Greenpeace campaigner as a child. "
That's not a plus. Greenpeace puts peoples lives at stake, and lies to bully large corporation. Green Peace lost any vestige of what it was around 1980.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Think for a moment how incredibly inefficient what you are proposing is. Every single time a company does something stupid that's detrimental to the rest of us we have to organize a boycott and start educating everyone else? No thanks.
We have government to make this process easier. It makes laws and it enforces them. We elect people run it for us. It collects taxes to finance itself. Perfect? Hell no. But government is certainly a of a lot better and reliable than having everybody trying to police everybody else. I don't know about you, but I prefer living in an advanced modern society instead of a cave.
So, now, go out and educate your law maker as to why they need to pass a net neutrality law and we won't have to revisit this issue again.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Circuit City isn't doing so great either. :)
Yup, NTL formally known as cabletel received an invoice from me for the loss of income due to multiple install date no-shows. They didn't accept the blame as such, but made a decent ex-gracia payment. The trick is to write "confidential" correspondence to the head honcho. That way his pawns and bitches don't get in the way.
Here's one that pisses me off that nobody cares about. When you go to get cell phone service they offer you a cheaper phone if you get a contract. The idea being that your cell phone service fee is subsidizing the cost of the phone, and you're really paying for it over time. But why don't they give a lower service rate for people that buy their own phones? It's a scam to lock out 3rd party phones. Nobody cares about it, and I often have a hard time explaining it to people, but the lack of competition has to be costing us...
Any financial issues Blockbuster have are most likely down to an evolving marketplace, and not getting rid of worthless customers.
Doctrow is a hack. A pretentious windbag who a certain element of people seem to think represents their beliefs.
I'm sure Virgin are quaking in their boots at this "threat" from someone who if there name was said to 99.999999% of people would say "Who?"
How about instead of ranting and talking about boycotts, he and his gang of tech-hippies start some sort of movement where they either flat out block requests from certain ISPs or at least throw up a "Here's our complaint about this ISP and why you should be using them" interstitial? That's the sort of thing that gets people to sit up and take notice.
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
I was going to give a few other examples, such as the health care industry, but realized that in most cases I could think of, the service or provider has always been corrupt and neither the standard of service or our expectations of it have really changed. It's merely less hidden.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
excuse me, this aint gonna be a smooth, politically correct post. im gonna flat out say what im feeling and thinking, as a customer.
you invent something new, you build an entire telecommunications infrastructure, hell, even a new medium, a way of life (internet) over it, it becomes a big success, and after a while a few FUCKTARDS comes up and and try to scuttle the CORE principle that made that big success for their personal greedy agenda. and furthermore, there comes a total PRICK, so PRICKY that he harbors the courage to SINGLE HANDEDLY trash and abolish those principles (net neutrality) in lieu of ENTIRE internet, internet tradition, all functioning services, companies and agreements up to date, in lieu of the LAW, in lieu of what they promised their customers, and anything.
im not a violent person. im a hippie in concept even. has history as my hobby and whatnot, and like classical music. but even i know that such people, who are that selfish and greedy enough to commit bastardizations like these in lieu of EVERYthing, deserve one single response : a strong, sharp kick in the middle of their face. literally.
Read radical news here
Err, no. Tiered pricing isn't like renting a better storefront. It's like having to pay the owners of the roads outside the houses of your customers so that they won't slow down your customers' cars whenever they try to drive to your store.
I can understand paying my ISP for a better connection for my server. But isn't it a bit perverse to have to then pay random other ISPs so that my customers are able to see the benefit of that better connection?
We've gone from the Electronic Frontier to a bunch of company towns run by greedy bastards and populated by idjiots who are happy as long as their YouTube videos play OK.
Sounds a lot like the historical Western Frontier.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Allow me to continue with your storefront analogy.
You pay rent on your storefront, and I have to ride the bus to get there. We both pay depending on what we want.
You want more people in your store at a time, you pay more rent.
I want to be able to get there faster, I hire a taxi instead.
Where the problem lies is that now the bus/taxi companies want to charge you, the store owner, for the bus/taxi to stop at your shop.
If you don't pay, your customers will have to walk the last 1/2 mile, despite the fact that your shop is on the main road, and all traffic goes right past you.
In fact, it's not a far stretch to imagine the taxi driver suggesting alternate destinations.
Me: Take me to the local grocery store.
Driver: You're going shopping? Why don't I drop you at Walmart, It's 20 minutes faster.
Me: No it isn't, walmart is in the next town.
Driver: Yeah, But we have a contract with them, we drive everyone there first.
This isn't capitalism anymore, it's extortion.
Look, I don't want to piss you off or anything, and I'm sure Cory is smart, but... what exactly has he done to prove it? I'm really not trying to be facetious.
He dropped out of four universities. He's a blogger. He writes science fiction about as well as Alan Dean Foster. Which is to say, mediocre science fiction. He started Boing Boing. He occasionally writes non fiction articles.
Am I missing something? Cure for cancer, grand unified theory, anything?
I'm sure Cory is both nice and smart, but his importance to a certain set of geeks seems blown way out of proportion to his actual accomplishments.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
As an American who hasn't been extremely well-exposed to English pop culture, I cannot say with certainty what the term "wanker" means, but there's a feeling deep inside of me that Cory Doctorow is exactly the person the term was created to describe. He and several more or less pretentious bloggers run the Boing Boing blog, each with their own running obsession--Disney, Tibet, kitsch, Internet memes, etc. This is a spot-on parody of him.
First, I like Alan Dean Foster. I was actually being charitable to Cory comparing him to Foster. Foster is a talented word smith with a good sense of pacing and dramatic tension. But he writes fairly pedestrian space opera.
Cory writes about some fairly interesting ideas, but they aren't really that original. And he doesn't know how to flesh them out into an interesting plot. It's almost as if they aren't really his ideas, and he didn't listen that carefully when they were being explained to him. His sense of pacing is a bit off, and his characterizations are flat. Especially women, who come off as caricatures.
I haven't had anything published, but I've read over two thousand speculative fiction books and stories. I've discussed the genre quite extensively. I'm objective enough to recognize a good author even if I don't like their style or subject. I think Cory is a halfway decent author, and I can actually finish his books without throwing them across the room in disgust. If there's no new Bear, Benford, Banks, Baxter, Egan, Gaiman, Gibson, Hamilton, Mieville, Pratchett, Robinson, Rucker, Simmons, or Vinge around, I might consider reading something he wrote.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Regardless of name recognition (and lack thereof), it's one less customer. People should stop paying for services provided by people/groups they don't like when given an option (even if the other option is 'nothing', provided the service isn't essential), even if the reason's something as stupid as 'I don't like the founder's fashion sense.'; if your reason is good enough, perhaps people will read what you have to say and think 'I could do that too'. Even if everyone goes back after a few months because the alternatives blow, it's still lost revenue.
Also, while '99.999999%' of people don't know who the hell he is, Boing Boing is fairly popular and gives him quite a nice soapbox to preach atop (as evidenced by this being plastered on the front page of Slashdot). I wouldn't be at all surprised if at least a handful of people were inspired to do the same and perhaps inspire others to.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.