| Can You Hear Me Now? | |
Dear Sir or Madam, Your censorship of personal email is an infringement on individual rights and personal freedoms. Verizon has no business meddling with or censoring any individuals' email. You are not providing your customers a service with your censorship. You are infringing their personal rights. It is not the purview of the ISP to determine what a customer might consider spam and what a customer might consider 'good' email. Your response to your customers concerning your current censorship of personal emails will be the subject of one of our upcoming online articles. Our articles are always well-researched and widely read. Many of our 450,000 subscribers as well as our Web site visitors read them weekly. Since Verizon has been sued at least once ( that we know of ) for censoring a person's private email, one would have hoped you would have joined with other, more progressive ISPs like Road Runner and Comcast and gotten out of the censorship business; and stopped meddling with and censoring your customers' private email. It seems a simple premise that email addressed to your customers belongs to them and not Verizon. Just like regular USPS mail belongs to the addressee and the not the USPS. However, it seems after reading your response to your customers you feel that their email belongs to you and it is your job to censor, block or delete whatever does not qualify or meet your arbitrary standards (i.e. your so-called "whitelist"). We can only hope you will receive a lot a lot of email when our article is published and hopefully other publications will reprint our article. We currently have an article pending in the "Financial Times of London". It just so happens that this article too deals with illegal actions by ISPs with regard to "spam filtering" (a form of censorship). We hope that you will stop censoring, blocking, deleting and/or interfering with your customers' private email and concentrate your efforts on providing your customers with the services for which they are paying you: namely -providing a reliable and fast connection to the Internet and basic email services. We hope our forthcoming article will serve as a catalyst to you and other ISPs to get out of the censorship business and get on with the business of providing and improving your Internet services and serving your customers. Sincerely, TC Cloudeight Internet http://thundercloud.net/ (This letter was edited for the Web) |