Earlier this year, Tim Wu wrote an important paper on wireless net neutrality. If you have a normal landline, your phone company can't block you from using any phone you want or calling any number you want. This is not the case for wireless companies. I received word earlier today that AT&T/Cingular, Qwest, and Sprint are blocking customers from calling free conference calling services.
As of Friday, March 9, it's come to our attention that Cingular Wireless has begun blocking all conference calls made from Cingular handsets to selected conference numbers. If you call our service, you receive a recording that says, "This call is not allowed from this number. Please dial 611 for customer service".
I called up Cingular spokesman Mark Siegel today, and he explained why they did this. The dispute at hand is basically a complicated intra-carrier fight that really isn't all that interesting (it looks something like this, suffice to say that these free conference call companies are not saints).
The gist is that AT&T/Cingular doesn't like these Free Conference call services because they cost the company money. Siegel said that customers that have a lot of free minutes spend too much time on them, and that if the number of users on them increase it will pose a financial problem for the company. I asked him how much it cost, and he wouldn't tell me, though he did give me this delightful quote:
"If we were not to keep a phenomenon like this in check, we wouldn't be able to offer great service and competitive rates to our 61 million customers."
I asked him how many of his customers use the conference call services, and he wouldn't tell me except to say that it's a very very small number (which kind of makes it hard to believe that it's costing AT&T/Cingular very much money).
There's a pricing problem with cell phones in that these companies offers customers free minutes they don't want used in specific ways. But rather than address the pricing issue, the telcos resort to their big brotherish legal rights. Here's how Siegal justified blocking the calls:
Wireless services are intended to be used by one person to call another person, not to call a conference call line where there are potentially hundreds of people on it. That's in our terms of service. We also have in our terms of service the right to block calls to certain kinds of numbers and we have used this right in this case.
Get that? If you have a cell phone, they can block your calls if you use your phone in ways they don't like. And they will, if it costs them money. Or rather, if they say it costs them money, a claim for which Siegel produced no proof. Apparently it's a very very small number of customers that are using these Free Conference call services but it's enough of a revenue threat that it's threatening their customer service?
Please. That's just false. And these people are in charge de facto of who you can and can't call. Incidentally, Sprint and Qwest blocked Free Conference call services last week, which leads me to think that there's not so much competition here as there is coordinated monopolistic behavior.
I think we could use some wireless net neutrality about now. This is very dangerous. And these are the same telecom elites that are asking for control over the internet itself.
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