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CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

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Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#91

Post by skuhn »

walrus01 wrote: post #2

Senior network engineer for an mid sized ISP here: These people should be ashamed of themselves. I honestly don't care even the tiniest bit about whatever sort of excuses or justification they put up. It should not be necessary for a consumer end user (whether residential or business) of an ISP in the US or Canada to treat their ISP as hostile, and develop workarounds like VPN tunneling their traffic, such as I would…

Comcast is still doing content injection, for a similar reason. If you go over your monthly quota, they inject a pop-window into HTTP sites to inform you.

Every other business manages to inform customers by e-mail or text message or phone call, but ISPs have these additional options by virtue of the product they provide and they just can't seem to help themselves (at least for the large shitty ones, which they all become eventually).

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#92

Post by _9vpl »

pwg wrote: post #4

And here we see the disconnect between what politicians say, and what they write into law. The bill's sponsor's response to the blog authors query: SB134 did not require that ...They were only required to notify customers of options via email or with an invoice. And here is the text of the statute that was written: (ii) A service provider may provide the notice described in Subsection (2)(b)(i): (A) by electronic com…

This is such a silly POV. Enforcing too much specifics into law is how you end up with non-nonsensical actions that are done just to comply with a law, like intrusive cookie banners on every single website. This law seems to actually be well written, other than it doesn't seem to specify any penalties for non-compliance, at least from the part of the law shown in the article.

It's clear what the end goal of the law is, and gives several broad, reasonable ways to comply with the law. Century link is the ISP/tech experts here - they are the morons who chose to do DNS hihacking when they could have just as easily sent out an email or added a notice to the bill for the month.

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#93

Post by bostonpete »

pytyper2 wrote: post #64
dragonwriter wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, the fault here lies with the politician. I disagree: the claim by CenturyLink that this particularly intrusive, access blocking method is mandated is simply false. It's true that it is permitted by the state law (just as it would be permitted without any specific law on the topic at all), and even arguable that it is one means of complying with the law. (Though since the notification is not presented to some us…

If the politician does not take responsibility (accept fault) who will? Taking responsibility for the text of at least the law the sponsor has proposed and helped pass is the minimum responsibility I would expect from a legislator. What else do we elect them for? The legislator wrote a law that allowed too much interpretation, that is the fault of the legislator.

I don't see any ambiguity in the wording of the law -- seems like it was intended to provide maximum flexibility in how the information was delivered. The wording also didn't rule out tying the information to a brick and throwing it through each customer's window, but I don't think anyone would be blaming the politicians if that's what the ISP decided to do...

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#94

Post by xahrepap »

CenturyLink is totally shady. My wife just yesterday spent a significant amount of time fixing our phone bill. She decided a couple months ago to upgrade to a "fixed" bill plan (apparently they've been raising our prices $10/mo every year for the last few years). This plan price won't change until we change the plan. It's bundled with their internet though, but my wife told them to not send the modem because we weren't going to be using it and didn't want to be charged for it.

Fast forward to yesterday and we had a modem in the mail a $200+ bill for our landline that should be About the modem, he said, "You can keep it or mail it back. I can make a note on our software that you didn't want it and it shouldn't bill you for it. However, I recommend you mail it back because sometimes that note will disappear from our software and start charging you again".

Wait... what!? Did he just acknowledge what some of us has suspected all along? That their software has intentional "bugs" that don't remember to stop billing someone for something?

The whole thing feels like a scam to me. I don't trust them at all. This isn't the first time and won't be the last either.

The reason we haven't canceled? No other traditional landline offerings in our area. Everything is VOIP or Cell. My wife wants something independent for emergencies. She's starting to question the value of it all though.

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#96

Post by jandrese »

theptip wrote: post #65
pwg wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> claim by CenturyLink that this particularly intrusive, access blocking method is mandated is simply false Agreed - also not the point I was making. > it's not any lawmaker’s fault that CenturyLink chose to implement pretty much the most user-hostile method imaginable Oh but it is the lawmaker's fault. It is the lawmaker's fault by writing a law that was so broadly worded as to allow Century Link to be able to perfo…

> If the law maker had written a more narrow law It shouldn't be the lawmaker's job to specify how businesses go about doing their business. The law was written generically enough that any sensible option would satisfy it; email, postal letter, addendum to your bill, or some other "electronic communication" that the lawmakers aren't qualified to specify. This is how laws should be written. There's absolutely no justi…

"The law made me do it" is an outright lie. They had numerous options under the law and they chose this one all on their own. They're trying to pass the buck onto the legislators and we should not stand for it.

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#97

Post by erikpukinskis »

craftyguy wrote: post #53
kingbirdy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your constitutional protections are protections from the government, not businesses.

Is the line a bit fuzzy though because most ISPs in the US are government-sanctioned monopolies?

Are you sure?

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#98

Post by ryanolsonx »

This happened to my brother-in-law. He asked for help when his router wasn't "working". Since I'm pretty computer savvy, I agreed to come and "fix" it. Little did I know that it was this BS. I got to that notice and then finally the internet started working again.

This is a small reason why NET neutrality is important. Total BS. I'll never use CenturyLink. I've thought about it in the past, but after this, H no.

Re: CenturyLink is blocking customer internet, saying Utah legislators told them to

#100

Post by twhb »

“It’s because the law gave them too much leeway” doesn’t make sense. If you have leeway, you choose the easiest and cheapest method, not the one that involves building a whole new communication system.

“They thought it was the only way to satisfy the law” also doesn’t make sense. There’s no reasonable way to get that from the law, they didn’t confirm it was necessary, and they didn’t publicly fuss about being forced into a large expenditure.

Today is, by the way, the one year anniversary of the repeal of net neutrality. ISPs, including CenturyLink, were viciously fighting to end rules preventing the sale of selective internet access, and won. In order to sell selective internet access, you need exactly the system that just showed up. This system would take a while to build—maybe a year. And once it’s built, you would want to test it. The test would put your capitalization on the lack of net neutrality in the spotlight—unless you just serve a legal notice, and pretend you thought you had to. For that to work, you need to make sure people know the “legally required” part; for a legitimately legally-required notice, companies typically don’t say as much. CenturyLink literally highlights it.

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