Hijacking the Internet
PC Magazine opinion by John C. Dvorak

It seems to me that if you buy a 1.5-Mbps connection, you should be able to redline the connection, to use the full capacity without being charged more. And you should also be able to use it for whatever you want to use it for. Otherwise, it's like selling public-utility water to people and making them pay more to use it for washing dishes.

Dvorak is loathed by many in the Mac community for his hyperbolic statements. But he has his moments and this is one of them. We've lived in California for a little more than three years and have seen the phone company change hands as many times. So I especially appreciate his noting that

In just six years, the name of the fabulous baseball stadium in San Francisco has gone from Pac Bell Park to SBC Park to AT&T Park. Just the expense of changing the signage and promotional collateral tells you that someone is making plenty of money.

The ads promoting "the new at&t" tell me that "your world is suddenly changing for the better ... all because two companies — two great companies — have now joined forward to deliver the world that matters most: yours." That 'better' world I'm inhabiting has resulted in a DSL connection that drops unexpectedly and repeatedly, regular phone service that was out for a week due to their own downed equipment that they wanted to charge me to come look at, customer service via phone that uses those maddening voice recognition menus (which don't recognize much) and then I get to find out about this:

Whistle-Blower Outs NSA Spy Room

AT&T provided National Security Agency eavesdroppers with full access to its customers' phone calls, and shunted its customers' internet traffic to data-mining equipment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switching center, according to a former AT&T worker ...