THE MAIN REASON I dumped Comcast as my Internet service provider is its oft-denied but nevertheless commonplace practice of arbitrarily categorizing genuinely Leftist blogs as “spam” and thereby prohibiting email transmission of any links to Outside Agitator's Notebook.
Now seven months later I'm far more permanently obstructed by CenturyLink, the only other broadband connection readily available in my part of Tacoma. Any time I (or anyone else) sends an email that includes a live-link to this blog, CenturyLink kills it dead as a fresh-stomped cockroach.
Since CenturyLink controls about seven percent of the broadband Internet, this alone is a substantial loss of potential readership. But the actual loss is much greater: embargoed as I am by CenturyLink, there is no way I can email Outside Agitator's Notebook links to potential new readers anywhere in the world.
It is an aside, but I would be derelict in my journalistic duty if I failed to point out the severely limited broadband availability in my neighborhood is characteristic of the for-profit Internet's defining contempt for lower income people. Such is capitalism, precisely as Ayn Rand defined it: infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue, and devil take the hindmost.
Meanwhile the censorship imposed by CenturyLink has proven infinitely more oppressive than its Comcast variant. With Comcast, sufficiently forceful complaints eventually got the embargo lifted – at least three times during the final year I was a Comcast subscriber, maybe a half-dozen times total. By contrast, CenturyLink's censorship is apparently forever.
It is also much broader that Comcast's censorship. And – as I would soon learn – it is protected by a defiant campaign of deliberate lies.
Thanks to an Occupy communications coordinator, a top-drawer computer professional with background including lengthy employment by Microsoft, I already knew CenturyLink had for a time embargoed all email Occupy Tacoma sent to any CenturyLink subscribers. Indeed it was a practice I helped stop, this by contacting an executive identified as Meg Andrews, a member of the mega-corporation's regional public relations staff in Seattle.
I explained to Ms. Andrews I was doing a story on the censorship and said I wanted to give CenturyLink an opportunity to defend its policy. In essence – though I was scrupulously polite about it – I was threatening the monopoly with public exposure, a tactic I had successfully employed many times during my half-century career in print journalism.
Lo and behold, the obstruction was soon lifted – a “glitch,” it was explained, complete with profuse apologies. Hence I foolishly told Ms. Andrews there was no longer a story.
That was on 15 November 2011. Then on 16 February 2012, when I tried to email my subscribers to notify them I had at last finished “Dancer Resurrected: a Story of Love, Art, Sex and Revolution” and posted it accordingly, I discovered this newest CenturyLink outrage: automatic interdiction of any email that includes the TypePad and Blogger URLs of this blog.
Not until the following day's correspondence with the Occupy communications coordinator, whom I had emailed seeking advice, was I told CenturyLink's November embargo had applied to every Occupation everywhere.
In other words, if Occupy Wall Street – or for that matter Occupy Timbuktu – tried to email a CenturyLink subscriber, the message was automatically blocked by the monopoly's anti-spam software.
Censorship of that magnitude is hardly accidental. It strongly suggests CenturyLink is acting on behalf the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. equivalent of the dread SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the Reich Security Agency or R.S.H.A.
Had I realized how widespread the November censorship was, I'd have gone ahead with the story, CenturyLink's “glitch” claim be damned. In fact I'm a little ashamed Ms. Andrews' apology and seeming pleasantness conned me into dropping the story. It was an error for which – in the years I sat an editor's desk – I'd have harshly criticized any of my reporters.
And this time it took no digging at all to unearth the (inevitable) Big Business Big Lie. CenturyLink claimed it was removing the obstruction – a claim first verbalized on 16 February 2012 during an hour-long telephone conversation with a Century Link tech rep who identified himself as Randy Schnetzer – but Schnetzer's reassurance turned out to be nothing more than a corporate jerk-off.
The company reiterated its lies in an unsigned email the same date (“Ticket Nr. NTM000007949515”) and in subsequent emails (“We'd like to hear from you”) dated 19 and 26 February 2012.
Hence – realizing Century Link had in essence told me to fuck off, on 6 March I sent Schnetzer the following email, the original in all caps and boldfaced/underscored as below to convey the irate tone my voice would have taken were Schnetzer and I again speaking on a telephone:
Apropos ticket nr. NTM000007949515, you and your colleagues lied: the blockage has not, say again not, been removed. Nor – again contrary to the lies told me by your colleagues – was it ever removed.
My assumption is therefore that CenturyLink – despite your protestations to the contrary – is arbitrarily imposing de facto censorship on my blog, Outside Agitator's Notebook.
The very least you could do is be honest enough to acknowledge what you are doing, so that I can begin the search for another Internet service provider – one that at least offers the pretense of respect for the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Meanwhile – needless to say – I am outraged. Your malicious breach of contract (and it is clearly nothing less than that) is of a magnitude that makes Comcast appear truly benign.
But I suppose I should expect nothing better of a mega-corporation headquartered in Louisiana, a state so far to the neo-Nazi right the Ku Klux Klan still parades openly through its streets.
Believe me, you have not heard the last of this. I am among other things a member of both the National Writers Union (UAW local 1981 AFL/CIO) and the National Press Photographers Association. Indeed I have already informed union officials of what is happening. I strongly suspect the American Civil Liberties Union, with which I have a near-lifelong association, will also be amongst the interested parties.
Were I a gambling man, I'd bet big money this allegedly “nonexistent” censorship is fast becoming our national norm. As I explained in a heads-up letter to a favorite editor, I suspect it is “merely one of many modes of de facto Internet censorship characteristic of the United States, typically imposed by privately owned for-profit Internet servers, probably under direction of the Department of Homeland Security.”
“By working through the private sector – especially true given how the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled the First Amendment does not apply in the workplace – the Ruling Class is able to impose censorship as effective as anything one encountered in Nazi Germany, but nevertheless do so without (technically) violating the Bill of Rights.”
My continued protests to CenturyLink have, of course, done no good at all. Polite or angry, the result is the same – and why be courteous to corporate functionaries who intend to fuck you over no matter what?
As indeed they have done. Which – given the radical limitations so imposed on my readership – has me asking myself if the associated writing and photography is even worth the bother. For the moment I intend to persist, mainly because I believe it's still possible to force CenturyLink to stop ripping me off and instead provide the service for which I am paying.
And “force” is indeed the operant verb: the bitter truth is that capitalists respond to nothing else.
Hence I'll keep looking for new ways to let all of you know when I've posted a new essay.
Any suggestions, please speak up via the “comment” portal.
Whatever happens, many thanks for your readership, all the more so since in today's United States, even daring to read forbidden thoughts – mine or anyone else's – no doubt gets us on a Ruling Class shit list.
LB/15 March 2012.
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