Verizon Virally Debates Net Neutrality Over Blogosphere
The Borderline Blog has a great expose on Verizon's attempt to virally influence debate about subjects like Net Neutrality through the Channel Changer blog... which (surprise!) has become password protected since the shit hit the fan.
Why would a 20 year old college student — only take time out of his lazy days pursuing his English major and dreamily strumming on his guitar — spend ten months writing an extremely focused blog about arcane debates involving cable television and the future of Internet access?
Correct answers include: schizophrenia, or he's a paid PR flackey of Verizon. Guess which is the correct answer?
Lies, cable TV, and Patrick Hynes [Borderline] (Thanks, John!)
This is a test using rich text formatting and html links. It's the generic "company" ad that should appear on all posts with the Company category if they don't have an ad attached to a specific company.
Post a comment
Comments:
Ain't viral, just corporate bullshit. "Viral" has to be something started by corporations which other people take into their own element and promote. This is just a corporate stooge.
Why do corporations automatically assume that all consumers are complete imbeciles? It only takes a couple of seconds of deductive reasoning to discover that something like this is a load of crap paid for by Verizon. I hate how patronizing companies can be with their internet advertising and PR efforts. My fiery hatred of Verizon is renewed yet again.
If you check the posts, there are zero comments. What a popular blog that guy has! :-)
hey, i have no email access, so just FYI, google pages have been unavailable to all comcast users in MA. all morning. First Comcast said it was firefox's issue, and a super refused to handle the call, as the tech support on the phone told me it was firefox's prob and they dont support firefox. (thats bull) Then we alerted them that even with IE, gmail and blogger is unavailable, and it only seems to affect MA. users of Comcast. In addition, when not using Comcast as a provider, people in MA. do not have this prob. A tech told me they have recieved a TON of calls about it this morning.
A super just told me that "they don't know why comcast will not allow access to Google right now" a tacit admission, unless he mispoke. He also told me that when they recieve a certain amount of calls about the issue, they will issue a flash bulletin to the tech people. and that they havent yet reached that point, even though the phone lines are blowin up over there with everybody complaining of the same issue. at this stage, it seems that only Google and also YouTube sites are unavailable.
the channel changer blog is not password protected as of right now.
This is one of those cases where you ask yourself, "how can Verizon possibly get any worse?", and then they set out to prove how.
The whole bit about NWS aparrently bribing people to counter-act bad rumors/talk/whatever on the internets is just further proof of how, generally, all information should be looked at very carefully and the source checked and double checked to make sure some corporate asskissers aren't paying someone to put it all up.
I own my own forum, and I hope I never run into this... though if I do, it's going to be really, really fun setting the jerks to use the seizure-causing color theme.
Not password protected... but also no (obvious) trace of a college student persona. The about page is blank, the layout is clean and generic, the posts impersonal.
Reminds me of those Verizon commercials where the college students are traveling across the country filming a documentry of people talking about how great the Verizon coverage is....riiiigggghhhtt, that sounds exactly like film student I've ever met.
Well, said student could have serious issues like http://www.deadspin.com/sports/college-football/if-only-he...
I guess it would be a problem if you neglected your business because you were busy posting reasons why LSU won a National Championship in football over USC. Which means you'd have to be similarly messed up to support communications companies in their bid to scuttle Net Neutrality.