Space Grab

I remember as a child watching the Apollo 11 mission plant an American flag on the surface of the moon.  I thought it peculiar—although I did not understand enough to question those feelings—that we could land on a body in space and brand it with our national icon.  I thought that the moon belonged to the Earth.  How was it possible that we could claim it for ourselves?

At some point during the past forty years, we turned our eyes from the skies to the wonders of cyberspace.  Instead of light-years, our universe is now measured in bandwidth—a nearly limitless capacity for communication and data transfer.  Almost without notice, we stopped dialing in and became wirelessly connected.  Long distance charges disappeared.  Grandmothers everywhere became computer literate, emailing photos of their grandchildren and downloading their favorite books to hand-held devices.  We all thank G-d that Al Gore gave us the Internet!

On this Fantastic Voyage, however, (gratuitous Raquel Welsh reference for those of my generation) we are not just scientific explorers.  We are capitalist mercenaries looking for the next big score.  One thing I learned from working for a publicly-held corporation is that “growth” is the only thing more important than profit.  Making a killing is never enough.  It is important that profits grow at a constant rate; there is no resting on the laurels of flat profits.  Investors bet on which companies can sustain growth; the real money is made from that speculation.  It was only a matter of time before large corporations made us victims of our own acquired thirst for more:  more apps, more text, more music, more speed. 

I thought I was doing a nice thing when I purchased the new iphone 5 for my daughter’s birthday.  As the youngest in the family, she is forever getting the hand-me-down technology.  Her many-generations-old Blackberry was on its last legs, sometimes not even turning on.  When kids are at college, their cell phone is their lifeline.  It is a virtual intercom system to all their friends and family, as well as an alarm system to the parents for help or money.  Her old device was hindering her life and quashing her happiness.  The launch of the new device was well-timed with her birthday, making it possible for her to be one of the first kids to have an iphone 5 on campus.  It is not the sort of thing we typically do, which made the surprise even greater.

But, ah, the hidden costs of doing business.  We are Verizon subscribers.  During the one-hour phone conversation required to upgrade to the iphone 5, I was informed that I would be required to migrate to a new service plan, as the old plan was “no longer available.”  The former $30 per month “data plan” would now be $30 per month for 2 gigabytes of data.  Together, the sales associate and I audited my daughter’s data usage on her Blackberry and determined that she used, on average, .000159 gigabytes per month of data.  Convinced that I was signing up for an equivalent service at an equal price, I accepted the terms and conditions.

One week into using her new phone, my daughter began getting email alerts from Verizon warning that she had exceeded 50% of her 2GB monthly budget of data.    A couple of days later, the warning was up to 75%.  I called Verizon to check whether there was some sort of error.  They pointed the finger at my daughter, saying that she must be downloading all sorts of things.  They read from a script of items that fall under data services.  I checked with my daughter who was not doing anything with her phone other than texting and playing her itunes.  She had not downloaded any apps, used GPS, watched a movie, or ordered any custom ringtones.  In fact, she was so busy with her studio work she had not even taken the time to set up her email.  The one thing she did do was call the computer center to make sure she had the appropriate password for the campus wifi, something that would pretty much ensure that she was not abusing the data services.

The alert emails from Verizon continued, and each time I would call Verizon to try to ascertain what was responsible for these charges.  How could it be possible that, without changing her habits, she was using more data in three weeks than she had used in the previous twelve months?  The question was very specific, but a satisfactory answer was not forthcoming from Verizon.

After many such calls to Verizon, I happened to get connected to an honest and knowledgeable support person.  She informed me that Apple changed its texting capabilities; the new “imessage” activity on the iphone5 is being charged to “data services” rather than as text under the “unlimited text plan.”  Verizon figured out that the data usage would skyrocket under this scheme, so they transformed the unlimited data services plan to a pay-by-the-gigabyte plan.  While promoting and discounting the iphone 5, Verizon quietly forced its subscribers to convert to terms that looked the same to an ignorant consumer but were certain to generate revenues increases for Verizon. 

For the record, AT&T did the same with the release of the iphone 5.  My husband uses his iphone 5 on an AT&T plan.  His monthly fee doubled the first month on the iphone 5 because of the increase in his data usage.

It turns out that there is a happy ending for this story.  It took persistence and multiple calls, (and a threat to return the iphone 5) before someone at Verizon explained that we could turn off the data usage of the imessage and use the phone in standard text mode.  Once we did this, my daughter’s texting was covered under our unlimited text plan, and her data usage returned to its customary levels.

Space may be the final frontier, but cyberspace is a capitalist free-for-all.  We want our toys so badly that we sign up for huge termination fees and even pay an extra service fee for the privilege of buying a new device from the provider.  There is no other industry in the world that has its customers so tied up with extraneous fees and penalties.  We allow it, and then we say, “Thank you.  May I have another?”