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Wednesday, June 13, 2007
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 Wednesday, June 13, 2007
started 6/13/2007; 12:19:51 PM - last post 6/15/2007; 10:50:13 AM
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Doc Searls - Wednesday, June 13, 2007 
6/13/2007; 4:19:51 PM (reads: 23786, responses: 5)
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Dear AT&T: Please go to hell 
| | If you had any illusions that what you get from the likes of AT&T is "the Internet", you've just been corrected. |
| | Remember Ma Bell? Sheee's back! And now she's got the TV and "the Internet" as well as the phone. |
| | The San Antonio-based company started working last week with studios and record companies to develop anti-piracy technology that would target the most frequent offenders, said James W. Cicconi, an AT&T senior vice president. |
| | The nation's largest telephone and Internet service provider also operates the biggest cross-country system for handling Internet traffic for its customers and those of other providers. |
| | As AT&T has begun selling pay-television services, the company has realized that its interests are more closely aligned with Hollywood, Cicconi said in an interview Tuesday. The company's top leaders recently decided to help Hollywood protect the digital copyrights to that content. |
| | "We do recognize that a lot of our future business depends on exciting and interesting content," he said. |
| | Kinda gives ya the warm scuzzies, huh? |
| | If I were an AT&T customer today, and I had any other choice of service provider, I'd drop AT&T like a bad transmission. In fact, if you're an AT&T customer, I suggest you do exactly that. If you can. |
| | Then I'd work every way I could to build out the Net from the edge in, instead from the center out. That's the only way to keep it from becoming a one-way sluice for "exciting content" from Hollywood. |
| | Hat tip to Dave for the heads-up. Money quote: If there were a death penalty for corporations, AT&T may have just earned it. |
Getting in bed with ourselves
| | I ask a question: Could Google and its partners do as good a job in the advertising business if they did everything it takes to get a green score? |
| | And suggest that the answer is no. |
| | I also suggest that both advertising (as a monoculture) and privacy are problems that cannot be solved from the supply side. Specifically, We can't leave privacy solutions entirely up to large suppliers. That can't work. We can only solve privacy problems by equipping individuals with better ways to control and reveal private information while also finding what they want in the networked world. Until we do that, Privacy International will still be ranking sites with colors other than green. |
Reducing survey suckage
| | That blog should become a lot more active soon, by the way. |
On the continuing end of business as usual
| | Essentially, VRM feels like it could be like a want ad on steroids, a combination of Craig's List and virtual agent. We never really got CMR (Customer Managed Relationships), we got stuck with somebody else's CRM. So we can't really tell them what our needs are, what segment we are in, or anything else that might help both parties. We have to engage on the terms of the vendors only. |
| | VRM is a concept about creating the tools to turn this CRM/lead generation formula upside-down. |
| | It reminds me a bit of the electronic invoicing and payment systems introduced first in the 80's by companies like GM, and embraced on a much wider scale in the early 00's. Companies were faced with miscellaneous invoicing formats from their thousands of suppliers, and were forced into a very inefficient process. Technology changed that, ultimately for the benefit of both the suppliers and the buyers, although it was the large buyers who drove the development and adoption of the process. Just in time inventory really only became possible because of the infrastructure established around invoicing and payment, which could then be extended to ordering. |
| | She's also read deeply into the ProjectVRM wiki, and added some isefull intelligence as well: |
| | Zopa and Prosper -- the non-bank intermediaries in personal lending -- clearly share some genetic material with the VRM meme. |
| | Lots of great progress being made here. |
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Ed - Re: Tuesday, June 12, 2007 - ATT
6/14/2007; 1:31:12 PM (reads: 959, responses: 1)
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You go Doc with the ATT thing! Your post on this issue was uncharacteristically strong (Please go to hell!).
Wow.
So big business and government will try to control the internet. No kidding. We must keep up the good fight on this one.
From the government end is Tony Blair's recent attack on internet journalism:
http://www.slate.com/id/2168316/nav/fix/
I can see why Mr. Blair would be critical of internet journalism. As of late his ass is grass and the internet is a lawnmower!
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Ed - Re: Tuesday, June 12, 2007 - ATT
6/14/2007; 1:38:36 PM (reads: 1053, responses: 0)
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Mark - Re: Dropping AT&T
6/14/2007; 10:54:14 PM (reads: 953, responses: 2)
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You wrote:
"If I were an AT&T customer today, and I had any other choice of service provider, I'd drop AT&T like a bad transmission. In fact, if you're an AT&T customer, I suggest you do exactly that. If you can."
Great advice! I dropped them nearly ten years ago after they charged me over $3,000 for toll-free local calls. After going up the chain of AT&T Customer Service and getting nastier responses and threats the higher I went, I talked to someone at our local phone company who advised me to go to the state's public utilities commission. I wrote them a letter explaining the problem, and they forced AT&T to drop the erroneous charges immediately. Since that experience, I would never have anything to do with AT&T.
Mark Reed
http://www.techhelpbasics.com/blog/
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Doc Searls - Re: Dropping AT&T
6/15/2007; 2:50:13 PM (reads: 1081, responses: 0)
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For what it's worth, the AT&T of today ("The New AT&T") is actually accumulated fractions that had been blown off of the Really Old AT&T — the original Ma Bell — in the decision that broke the old lady up in 1983. What calls itself AT&T today used to be SBC, for Southwest Bell. One of the original seven "baby bells", Southwest Bell ate three of the others — Pacific Telesis, Ameritech and BellSouth — before finally eating what was left of AT&T (the company you dropped ten years ago), giving it the right to call itself "AT&T", even though it really wasn't. Some people call it "fATT", for "faux AT&T." Between Ed Whiteacre's remarks and this latest commitment to value subtraction , the New fATT is no less worthy of droppage than the Old AT&T was ten years ago.
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