and there is the added bonus that your house might catch on fire.

“But it’s a company with capital behind it!” big budgets to take care of the customer, take care of the issues.

We’re led to believe we need to trust them over the mom and pop ISP down the road who will provide you with better service.

As for terms of service, Ron Paul was a good solution, but media failed us.

Obama seems to be a good solution. Thoughts?

Keep up the good work, Mike Shinoda…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fye8wWcnvGs

The problem is that no one gets to see what they are agreeing to before they sign the papers and agree to it. I don’t know what the legal ramifications are though. It might be one of those “Well you should have asked to see the TOS before you agreed to the service”. or if they actually have to show it to you before you sign and they just haven’t been doing that because most people don’t run web servers from there home.

I’ll caveat everything below by stating up front that I can NOT speak for Verizon, Time Warner, or any other company but my own. The information provided below is based solely on current industry practice and the laws that support them……

As an executive of an ISP who regularly competes with the likes of Verizon and Time Warner (and who sits on a few industry councils/committees), I hate to overturn the rocks that it seems many of you have been living under, but here are the “unfortunate” facts:

(1) EULAs and TOS are indeed legally binding contracts that are fully enforceable in US courts. Whether you have read them, understand them or comply with them has absolutely no impact whatsoever on their enforceability. It can have SOME impact on how a court decides the fate of the offender.

Along those same lines, and as hard as it is for even me to believe, BOTH contracts can, in most instances, be enforced even if you have NEVER SIGNED A SINGLE DOCUMENT acknowledging you were ever made aware that they existed. I won’t go into all the legal justification behind these facts, but suffice to say it all comes down to two very simple concepts:

(a) “Reasonable efforts” must be made by the enforcer to make you aware of the terms in place or being put in place, and

(b) “Reasonable methods” must be provided by the enforcer to allow you to cancel the contract if you do not agree with the terms.

Simply stated, if both of those conditions can be shown to apply, your are fully bound by the EULA, TOS or any other agreement a provider deems appropriate to put in place AT ANY TIME. In the parameters of the current blog, that means even if an end user never sees an EULA before buying the product, all a software vendor has to do is place a copy of the EULA in front of the user before the software can be used and require the end user’s acknowledgement of acceptance before installation can be completed OR the option to disagree with the EULA and automatically prevent installation. You’ve all seen this. The fact that you’ve probably clicked ‘I Agree’ without reading the pages of EULA is not a defense in court.

It is interesting to note that a few courts initially decided that it was not “reasonable” for someone to read and understand a multi page legal document when only being able to view it a paragraph (or sentance) at a time on a screen. In response to this, the software industry has pretty much adopted the capability of allowing you to print a copy of the EULA for your records BEFORE agreeing to it. There has not been any successful defense in US courts against enforcement of any EULA or TOS with this “printability”.

Perhaps just as disturbing is the fact that MOST EULAs and TOS contain clauses that state they can change terms and conditions at any time by merely posting same to their web sites 30 days in advance of such changes, and that if you continue to use the product, service or whatever beyond that period, you automatically accept the new terms and conditions !!!

Good, bad or otherwise, this paradigm has made its way into far more aspects of our lives than you might imagine. You need only look to the credit cards in your wallet for proof that terms, conditions and rates can change and your continued use after the change (without you otherwise “agreeing” to or “accepting” the changes) constitute proof that you’ve nonetheless accepted them.

Bringing this concept directly to the discussion of ISPs in general (and Verizon in specific), there is nothing which prohibits them from using the exact same paradigm. In its simplest derivation, that means that any ISP can change its TOS at will and your continued use of the service constitutes your acceptance. In other words, an ISP does NOT have to explicitly state that you can not run web servers, etc… or that it will block port XX, YY, or ZZ in its TOS. This is partially because what constitutes “Internet Access” remains a legal enigma. Generally speaking, if you can read a web page and send/receive a personal email, you have “Internet Access”.

Legally speaking, if you want to run a web server, mail server, game server or whatever, your ONLY protection to be able to do so is to demand such specific capabilities (or support for them) BEFORE (or as a written part of) any order you place for such services. Then, and ONLY THEN, do such factors become part of the vendor’s requirement in supplying you service. Without those conditions, an ISP who permits you to runs these services one day can literally turn them off 30 days later and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it other than to pay your bill (including any early termination penalty should you chose to disconnect).

It may seem unfair. It probably is. But those are the facts and the law (as currently in place in all 50 states) supports it.

So how might Verizon (or ANY ISP) get you to agree to TOS that you didn’t sign BEFORE ordering said service? Simple, if an ISP takes you order over the phone or web and in so doing, makes you aware that all terms and conditions are listed on their web site, they’ve generally met their requirements for enforceability if those terms and conditions allow you to cancel service within 30 days of installation. Another method is if the ISP forces your first connection to the Internet to be redirected to their TOS page (this is most often used in hotels for temporary Internet Access, but nonetheless applies in this instance too). There are many other methods which reduce cost and labor for the ISP over getting a signed, written contract, but you get the idea.

Finally, how does Verizon get away with cutting the copper lines to your home? Well, once again I want to stress that I can NOT speak for Verizon in any capacity so my answer below is solely my own and not meant to reflect anything about Verizon’s practices. However, that being said, I suspect that since Verizon most likely OWNS those lines (from the pole to your house), they are merely “upgrading” the infrastructure they own and are well within their legal rights to do so. By the way, the same holds true for your local cable company. The reason they disconnect at the pole instead of ripping the lines off your property is that its cheaper for them to leave them there. If they wanted to pull them out, they certainly could.

And for the gentlemen who “could care less about EULAs, etc…”, I can only say that he should hope no software company, ISP or other vendor ever decides to use him to set an example of how far they can enforce their contracts. Single users are rarely selected for such actions, but it has happened and will continue to happen from time to time. In those cases (you can look them up yourself), the maximum possible penlty is typically granted.