Keeping up with Verizon’s sneakwrap changes

The fact that online service providers expect you to check in periodically to see if they’ve made any changes to their Terms of Service (ToS) is already an old, bad joke. But if you’re in the mood for a really bad joke, take a look at what’s involved in really tracking those changes even if you wanted to try. Even when a vendor like Verizon at least goes through the motions of giving its customers some form of notification of its ToS changes, it’s pretty un-funny how quickly the exercise turns absurd.

“I thought you’d be interested in Verizon’s method for notification of their new terms of service,” a reader wrote recently. “It was sent late Friday evening February 29, saying that unless we respond by March 4 –that’s one business day, Monday –we’ve accepted the changes. I challenge anyone to get through to Verizon (past the voice mail hell and all the voice mail recognition menus and 20-minute hold times) within one business day. Besides, what are you supposed to do, cancel your Internet service and replace it in that one business day?”

Now, many Internet service providers won’t notify you of changes to their terms at all – you’re supposed to read their ToS online every once in a while to see if anything important has changed. So the fact that Verizon Online sent the reader an e-mail with the announcement of the Verizon Internet Access ToS being replaced is commendable. Not only that, but the notice contained a helpful summary of the changes to the terms. Well, maybe a little helpful.

“The changes are sort of described in the e-mail, but if you read it you’ll notice it doesn’t really say anything about what’s actually changed,” noted the reader. Indeed, Verizon’s overviews talks about “reordered,” “consolidated,” “restated,” and “streamlined” provisions and added terms for different services, but there are no specifics. So perhaps there are no substantial changes? OK, but then why did Verizon bother? There’s only one to be sure of course, as Verizon puts it:

“Described below are some of the changes reflected in the Verizon Terms. However, we recommend that you review the entire Verizon Terms to familiarize yourself with them. Your continued use of your Verizon Online Services after the above effective date will constitute your agreement to the Verizon Terms.”

The reader tried to comply, but the task proved a little daunting. “I went to the Verizon Online policies website and found that there were about 50 printable pages of policies to be read there, all in legalese of course,” he wrote. Actually, by my count (for my zip code, so your results may vary), there are 14 documents, 87 pages, 33,083 words, and 204,869 characters. Not all of the documents are going to pertain to every Verizon Online customer, but the only way you’re going to know that for sure is to read them all. And 33,000 words is the length of a short novel – for comparison, the “Old Man and the Sea” is about 26,500 words, “Animal Farm” is 29,000, and “The Call of the Wild” is 37,000 – all of them slightly easier reading than the Verizon lawyers’ prose. So trying to follow Verizon’s suggestion would have made a significant dent in the reader’s weekend.

It’s something of an aside, but one provision did catch my eye as I was copying the files to do word counts. The Verizon Internet Access ToS is governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia. I’m not quite sure why that would be – Verizon itself is headquartered in New York and the contact address provided for Verizon Online is in Florida. While I assume there’s a good reason in Verizon’s complicated history for choosing Virginia law, my long-time readers will know what this means. Virginia and Maryland are the only states that enacted UCITA, a law that makes enforceable even the most outrageous terms in sneakwrap “contracts” like Verizon’s ToS. (To learn more about why UCITA was rejected by all the other states – to the point that some have passed laws protecting their citizens against UCITA – visit the AFFECT coalition website at www.ucita.com.)

Perhaps a few masochists would be willing to read Verizon’s book-length set of legal documents once a year or so, but Verizon makes changes to its ToS a lot more frequently than that. Its announcement page shows four previous changes just since last June. The one on June 14th was particularly worthy of being brought to the attention of customers, since it was supposed to “clarify that Verizon reserves the right to limit or restrict bandwidth usage or take other action to enforce usage limitations we may establish from time to time for the Service.” This change was made at the same time that Verizon knew it was being investigated by the state of New York for cutting off some broadband customers who had exceeded secret usage limits on what Verizon marketed as an “unlimited” service.

What other hints might be hidden in those 33,000 words about what Verizon is actually up to? We don’t know, because, as the reader says, life is too short for any of us to read it all. “So here’s a new form of binding, accepted-if-you-don’t-opt-out, sneak-contract,” the reader wrote. ” Just send out e-mail about the changes — I’ll bet complaints forced Verizon to do even that — but still make it virtually impossible to read it and change in time. Besides, who has the lifetime it would require to read all these interminable contracts and their changes in terms of service?”

And the scary thing is that Verizon Online is probably behaving better in this regard than many of its competitors. At least they are providing e-mail notification of changes instead of just expecting you to read all their legal documents to if they’ve arbitrarily changed the rules. As laughable as such a form of “contracting” is, it would seem that the joke is on us.

Post your comments about this story below or write me at Foster@gripe2ed.com.