Net Neutrality has been a hot word to use the past couple of years. With questionable tactics being raised by telecommunication companies to control internet access for users, it will only continue to grow. The latest Net Neutrality incident comes from the Northeast, with the telecom FairPoint Communications.

FairPoint is taking over internet distribution from Verizon, who is giving up 1.5 million landline accounts going into the new year. All of this is pretty standard fare, but the big question is the handling of email accounts through FairPoint’s service. All of the Verizon accounts will have to be switched over to FairPoint. This can either be a small, or big hassle depending on how much you rely on your email address for communication.

I can actually forgive FairPoint for having customers switch from their Verizon accounts, to theirs. It makes sense, considering it’s a huge telecom switch. Where I draw the line though, is that FairPoint is restricting access to third party email services (AOL, Yahoo, Google etc..). Users of these services will still be able to keep their addresses, but can only access their accounts through FairPoint’s email portal.

Needless to say this is a huge breach of privacy in terms of a provider-client relationship. Restricting access to a site because of a service that millions across the country use every day? I’m not sure what the thought process behind the decision was. If anything, having customers rely on other third party services helps keep the strain off their servers. The only real advantage to forcing users to use FairPoint’s portal would be if they have advertising on their pages.

This is quite upsetting, as it’s but one step (albeit a small one) towards telecoms garnering more control over content. First, it started with capping bandwidth for people utilizing a large about of data transfer. Now, FairPoint has taken it a step further restricting users from free services on the internet.

Where/When is it going to end?

[via: Rutland Herald]

This entry was posted on Monday, December 29th, 2008 at 9:36 am and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.