Level3 tries cell-phone style billing scam on customers

Jamie A Lawrence jal at jal.org
Thu Jul 31 19:28:47 UTC 2008


On Jul 31, 2008, at 2:45 PM, Gadi Evron wrote:

> Isn't malicious, just not very ethical. Having been on the recieving  
> end a few times.. you don't always know it is happening.

I'm not sure that's a useful distinction. I strongly doubt any vendor  
has actual malice towards me (modulo some people I've pissed off at  
times in panics). Ethics are what I hope for from partners, try to  
demonstrate, and it is proven over time.

That said, inventing random fees, hiding them as "taxes" or "federally  
mandated something or other", and seeing what sticks to the wall in  
order to get that tiny percent profit boost is not going to make any  
friends in a network community. It works much better with cell  
customers or unaware bean counters, but netops folks are going to see  
it. L3 have given me reason to not like them in the past, and this is  
just more of the same. The problem is that the big boys seem to be  
racing to the bottom, so there isn't anyone better to which to defect.




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