Free speech under threat

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gulmer

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Sep 30, 2003
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AT&T Threatens to Disconnect Subscribers Who Criticize the Company
From ars technica, September 30, 2007
By Ken Fisher

AT&T has rolled out new Terms of Service for its DSL service that leave plenty of room for interpretation. From our reading of it, in concert with several others, what we see is a ToS that attempts to give AT&T the right to disconnect its own customers who criticize the company on blogs or in other online settings.

In section 5 of its legal ToS, AT&T stipulates the following:

AT&T may immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Service, any Member ID, electronic mail address, IP address, Universal Resource Locator or domain name used by you, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes (a) violates the Acceptable Use Policy; (b) constitutes a violation of any law, regulation or tariff (including, without limitation, copyright and intellectual property laws) or a violation of these TOS, or any applicable policies or guidelines, or (c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.

To read the article, click here.

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Well not sure how free speech plays a role here... ATT is not a government business.

But it does seem like crappy business practice and a good reason not to have them.
 
Nothing really surprising there and how it affects free speach is really nowhere to be found, all it really is is a glorified age old business sign, "We reserve the right to refuse service".
 
In addition to AT&T hard ball with it's customer base to limit anything a user would say that may tend to insult the company, we see this month as the month when ISP service may be taxed like phone service ie ~20% rate hike as well as a new legal resource for states to enforce sales tax sales.

Get ready for your basic internet services to cost double as well as
the bandwidth restricted to a higher rate base should you use your service for streaming media.

The age of bargain utility is about over. Call your congressman and ask him to vote to retrain the ISP non tax status. plus a law to prevent the use of "unlimited" when they limit it for you.

I agree that it is time the internet access be regulated as a utility and be made tax free as well as new rules for salestax for inteernet sales- ie- exempt!
 
F!*k At&t

AT&T sucks and since I am not a customer i have the utlimate freedom to slam them verbally whenever and whereever I choose too. To think I was to take them as my provider for DSL, due to a long sort of issues which was later found out theta I was one address too far from the serivce area. It was a good thing that I couldn't go through with their service, as it this thing here tops the cake.
 
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