AT&T vows revenge against customers who criticize its company
By George Gardner
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me? AT&T says not so much; in fact, throw a few hurtful words towards AT&T and you may have your Internet service terminated. And you thought Comcast was bad.
So it’s another one of those quirky lines located in AT&T’s 11,000+ word Terms of Service (TOS) agreement that all users, who want AT&T high speed Internet, must accept and agree to.
We’ve seen some wacky TOS lines in the past, but take a look at what Broadband Reports found in AT&T’s TOS this morning:
“AT&T may immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Service, any Member ID, electronic mail address, IP address, Universal Resource Locator or domain name used by you, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes … tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.”
In short, if you speak bad about AT&T (assuming they find out about it), they do have the ability to terminate your Internet Service. According to Wikipedia, this AT&T policy went into effect in September of this year.
This policy may just be a “safeguard” for excessive acts of defamation; however, an AT&T representative was not available for comment.
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October 2nd, 2007
Maybe that was a result of all the flack they were catching about the, “fewest drop calls,” motto…Instead of actually making their network one with the fewest dropped calls, they changed the slogan completely to, “more bars in more places,” and said, “by the way..if you talk bad about us anymore, we’re having none of it.” Really AT&T? Really?