FreeConference vs. Evil Empire–Minor Spat or Net Neutrality Behemoth?

Last week, Cingular/AT&T, Qwest and Sprint were accused of blocking FreeConference.com for their cell phone customers. (A Cingular/AT&T spokesperson actually confirmed it last Thursday (thanks Kap).) Callers who attempted to use the service received a message saying the service didn’t function on that particular network and were then routed to customer service–presumably to be offered conference calling services from these major carriers for additional cost, of course.

Black & white case of evil empire on independent operator? Well let’s see. The reason that FreeConference is in the mid-west (Iowa to be precise) is because they run an operation much like a 900 number operator. Rural phone companies tend to charge much-inflated termination fees for calls (that’s the charge that the local phone company charges the long distance company for placing calls to wireless numbers in its purview). Usually, these are less than a penny per minute where I live near a major urban center. But in places like Iowa, they’ve been blown up to 7 cents per minute or more. Ouch.

So guys like FreeConference come in and take advantage of this price buffer to invent services that look free on the surface but still have plenty of money changing hands as long as they negotiate the right deals. So does this make FreeConference a legit target for Evil Empire nuking?

According to Cingular/AT&T, the answer is ‘yes’ because in the case of FreeConference, AT&T could be forced to pay the termination fees for multiple parties in a con call, while FreeConference and its customers skate. So they’re justified in simply blocking the service in order to prevent this possible dent on their ever-precious bottom lines.

According to Oliver, however, the answer is “HELL, #$%@ING NO!” These price discrepancies are INVENTED by the phone companies, for crying out loud. As such, they’ve created these opportunities. Merely because FreeConference takes advantage of them doesn’t give AT&T the right to block any service they happen to dislike.

There’s a place where these types of grievances can be aired and resolved: It’s called the FCC, and AT&T will no doubt get a much better reception there than FreeConference would.

The simple black and white fact is that this should have gone through the courts before the phone companies were allowed to take this kind of action. Allowing cell carriers, Internet backbone providers or similar resource providers carte blanche control over the content running on these networks is blatantly bad for the e-economy as a whole, hugely negative for millions of small businesses looking for the best deals available, a kick in the crotch for Internet as an independent international community and my ulcer specifically.

FCC: Where are you when we need you?!

‘Nuff said.