Comcast is well on its way to becoming the least popular company since "We come round your house and corrupt your savegames Incorporated".  This recently came to a head with the story of geek Phil Shapiro, who’s moving out of his apartment because they’re switching to Comcast.

This story (reported by PCWorld) highlights a couple of facts about modern life. Firstly, for many their internet connection is just as important as running water.  Secondly, that being switched to Comcast is like being told your water will now be supplied from the local sewage treatment center.  This isn’t isolated hatred either – making old people complain can usually be achieved by being young and breathing, but when a seventy-five year old woman attacks your buildings with a hammer (as we reported previously) there’s a chance you’ve moved past "cold uncaring monolith" and into "dark, evil monolith inscribed with pulsing runes invoking eldritch forces to torment your customers."

What have Comcast done to deserve all this?

1. Sabotaging downloads
The greatest charge against them is how they throttle user downloads, a crime many users equate with cutting off your air supply.  If you haven’t already heard about this then there are probably a bunch of other things you should read up on, what with this being your first time online or out of a small cave in the last five years – for example, did you know that Apple have made a phone?  It’s apparently pretty nice.

They were eventually forced to admit to their "unlimited downloads*" (*not actually unlimited), as in this Engadget article, but not before

2. Lying about sabotaging downloads
In between restricting downloads and admitting that they were restricting downloads, there was a brief but very loud period of shouting from on top of a rooftop tiled entirely with sworn-upon bibles that they were NOT restricting downloads. 

They pledged upon their ancestors honour and every sacred bit of the internet that they would never dream of doing such a thing.  They established official guidelines for customer service representatives (available here at the Consumerist) to categorically deny ever having done such a thing, and threatening to fire anyone who even breathed a word that they were doing such a thing.  The thing they later admitted they were doing.

3. Lack of support for ‘things’ people ‘use’
These are difficult times for telecom companies, with all these crazy brand-new unheard of technologies like "Macintoshes" or "Firefox".  There are online cheese ordering sites compatible with those nowadays, but their arcane sorceries proved to deep to fathom for this poor little company, whose installations can only be performed with Internet Explorer (which they thoughtfully provide – as if the people who don’t use it do so because they simply can’t lay their hands on that rare and wonderful item).  Even better, their innocent bewildered technicians "nothing about *&@#$ing Macs" (as we saw earlier).

Honestly, what chance does a little largest internet service provider in America have, if people are going to go around "using" different "things"?

4. One way legal action
If the previous items looked more like incompetence than maliciousness, this should make things clearer: Comcast wants to sue you without risk.  And since the "gigantic corporation versus private individual" looks a bit too much like a fair fight for them they’ve been taking away peoples rights to fight back.  We saw in July how Montgomery county (MD) residents got a bill that was more of a "here’s your bill and oh, by the way, if you don’t specifically tell us that you’d like to keep your rights as a consumer within 30 days we’re going to assume you don’t want them, ‘k?"

5.  Because they hate you
They don’t like you.  They don’t want you.  They want the money that comes from you and every single thing you could possibly want in exchange is a pain and a nuisance, which is why they hire other people to deal with your whining and then trained them to lie to your face until you go away – as reported in this fascinating confession from a customer service representative reported by the Consumerist.

Related:

Entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 11:47 am under Crime, Internet, Legal, Opinion, Scams, Technology.

Read more entries by Luke McKinney.
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