The Oscars

It seems every blogger I follow feels compelled to say something about the Oscars show, so I may as well join in.

First of all, I didn’t get to watch any of it. For most of it, I was on the phone with Verizon customer service, either trying to upgrade my phone or trying to cancel the upgrade. I’ll explain in a moment.

But once I got off the phone with Verizon, we discovered that our FiOS set-top box was completely frazzled. It just displayed 88888 with a few miscellaneous other red and amber lights. After unplugging and re-plugging it a few times, we succeeded in getting it to display nothing at all.

So … another call to Verizon is needed. Actually, a third call, because we also have to complain about being charged to have a guy to come out and replace a battery in our endlessly beeping ONT box which is buried behind panelling and generally impossible to access. (They assured us they would only charge us if it turned out to be something we could have done ourselves, but it wasn’t and they did anyway!)

On the phone upgrade, here’s how brilliant Verizon is. A couple of years ago (minus 3 weeks, apparently) we switched from T-Mobile to Verizon. We did this for a variety of reasons, but masochism was not among them. We’ve had adequate service from them since then (apart from the beeping box and the dead TV receiver), but the battery life in my phone … well, there’s no other way to put it … sucks. I basically have to re-charge in the middle of the day, or the phone dies by the time I get home at night. This is even with Wi-Fi, BlueTooth, GPS and all those other techy things turned off!

So we go to a Verizon store, and they say: Your contract expires in 3 weeks. You can’t upgrade until then. What?!?! Think about this. I’m ready to hand them $300 for a new phone, and sign up for another 2 years, and they refuse! How could they not think my next move is to the T-Mobile store?

It gets better. We’re so perplexed by this that we decide to call Verizon when we get home. After much quoting of policy and procedure, they explain that although I’m not eligible to upgrade my phone for 3 more weeks, my wife is entitled to an early upgrade, because her phone is not smart enough. The customer servant explains that they can use her early upgrade to get me a new phone, but that she would then have to wait until the contract expires.

I really should have smelled trouble there, but … call it a moment of weakness … I agreed. We’d get me a new phone, and my wife, who wasn’t planning to get a new phone anyway, would have to wait 3 weeks to not upgrade.

I think you can guess where this is going. Of course, when we finally got an email confirmation of the order, it showed they were giving my wife an upgraded phone and, to sweeten the deal, they were tacking a $30-a-month charge on her line for data service ‘cause what’s the point of a smart phone if you don’t have data? We immediately got back on the phone to cancel the order.

Now the next customer servant decided to cancel the phone by calling the line to activate it. He figured it would ask for approval of the terms and conditions¹ and he could cancel the order simply by refusing to agree. We actually got the entertainment of listening to this Verizon guy trying to use Verizon’s voice mail system. Total fail.

Finally he connected us to a technical support guy who would supposedly be able to cancel the order. Well, he told us he would submit the cancellation, but by the way, we might still get a phone delivered to our doorstep, and we have to return it immediately without opening the package. Having no other recourse, we had to settle for that.

And that’s when we discovered that our Verizon FiOS TV receiver had died. Coincidence?

Others may disagree, but that’s my take on this year’s Oscars show.

¹ Standard terms: You owe us forever. You have no way to reach us except by waiting on voice mail, listening to our ads, for an hour or more. We arbitrate any disputes and you waive all rights to tell anyone about it. Sign here. 

Money Talks

I’m going to get serious for a minute, mainly because I can’t think of any good ways to make this funny.

Throughout history, in almost every country and culture, there have been people who own more property and wield more power than most. There have been thousands of rationalizations for this. Rich, powerful people were thought to deserve their wealth and power because they were born to other rich, powerful people. Or they were more industrious. Or they’re job creators. Or they are better educated or more sophisticated. Or they’re brilliant innovators. Or even that they're anointed by some gods or other. The list goes on and on.

But all of these rich, powerful people have always had the power to make the rules of whatever society they’re in. And they’ve always used that influence to make rules that keep themselves rich and powerful. It’s a simple matter of self preservation.

Ok, all that’s obvious. Likewise, its obvious that among the most useful tools for keeping the status quo are mass media. If you can actually control what people know about what’s going on, and what they think about it, you can pretty much call the shots. The first thing rebels do in a coup d’état is seize television and radio stations. Freedom of the press is great if you own a printing press.

But, in the late 20th century, something weird happened. Technology drastically reduced the cost of publishing, broadcasting, etc. Suddenly, almost anyone, or at least ordinary middle class folks could publish their own newspapers, or books, or even create television programs to distribute on the Internet.

Of course, most of these home-made newspapers and books and TV shows are crap. That’s the downside of democracy. There’s just a flood of stuff, and no one in a position to decide what’s good or bad except you, the consumer.

And here again, technology comes to the rescue. Traditional publishers and broadcasters had marketing and advertising budgets they could use to make you aware of their products, and lure you to them. Now, there are Web sites that tell you what’s hot … what lots of people are looking at. There are supposedly open user ratings and recommendations that can help you decide what media to consume. And there are advanced techniques for deciding what’s similar to what, so if you liked book A, you’d probably also like movie B.

All of this seemed like a revolution in communications. For the first time in history, readers, listeners and viewers could choose from millions of things to read, listen to or watch. You weren’t limited to what the major media outlets decided you should be exposed to. And any random person could develop a worldwide audience for his or her pictures of cats, or stuff on his rabbit or whatever.

Until Tuesday.

On Tuesday, a U.S. appeals court for the District of Columbia denied the FCC’s attempts to force big Internet providers like Comcast and Verizon to provide that service equally for all Internet sources. As a result, Verizon or Comcast could, for example, decide that by paying an extra fee, Google could ensure their searches are faster than Microsoft’s BING. Or vice versa. Verizon or Comcast could just give it to the highest bidder. Or they could block your access to the Huffington Post or al Jazeera or whatever else they decided not to like. If your corner store doesn't carry the newspaper you like, you can always go elsewhere. That's not so easy with Internet providers.

So, in effect, this ruling says that once again, rich people get to decide what you can or can't see.

This could be fixed in a number of ways, involving new laws, reclassifying Internet services, etc. But of course, laws are slippery, and they are also shaped by those same rich, powerful people.

Thomas Jefferson was right.