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from the you-only-ever-get-promised-'upto' dept.
Russell Petrick, disgruntled former Peak Internet customer, posted bad reviews online about his former ISP (on: Yelp, SuperPages, Better Business Bureau, and Yahoo) and is now being sued for an undetermined amount of money.
According to Techdirt:
Russell Petrick is disabled and spends a lot of time on his computer at home. He signed on with Peak Internet for web access to watch movies and surf the net. "It was just too terrible to consider keeping," Petrick said when asked about the service. He said he was paying $50 a month for Internet download speeds of 20 mbps... Petrick claims the speeds were nowhere near that, and averaged 6.5 mbps. "The fastest speed I got was 13.6 mbps download and 3.1 mbps upload," Petrick said. "I didn't get anywhere near the 20 mbps mark."
It seems that Peak Internet's view is "ISP to customer: thanks for paying for a 20 Mbps connection speed. Anything above 4 Mbps is bonus speed. Stop complaining."
A customer who can only approach the speeds of a connection priced at half what he's paying obviously isn't going to be happy, but rather than work towards improving connection speeds, the company apparently decided to defer to its fine print. This isn't a great way to provide customer service and suing someone over bad reviews is an even worse decision.
Here are The Suit for Your Viewing Pleasure [pdf], Complaint Teller County [pdf], and the KOAA5 News Report.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04 2014, @02:07AM
Way back when, people could say just about anything they wanted as long as:
1) It wasn't yelling 'FIRE!' in a crowded theater (safety issue).
2) It wasn't libel or slander -- deliberate lies printed or told
to hurt someone in a non-physical way.
Those days appear to be gone.
Money as free speech TRUMPS fact-based opinions however
unfavorable they may be to the affected party.... :(
Had the case gone to court, the ISP's lawyer team would
be sure to have any evidence the guy submitted to
the court called into question and/or thrown out.
You can't personally win battles like these--you have
to 'martyr' yourself in the court of 'popular opinion'
with the public at large in order to convince enough of
them to take action to support your cause. The guy did
his part by complaining online out in the open. Had
he used another ISP via a public access point to lodge
the complaints in an anonymous fashion, got feedback
in a public setting, then lined up another ISP for
himself for home use then canceled his current service
if contracturally possible and switched then things
might have gone differently for him.
In the end it is just another case of "Profits Over People".... :P
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04 2014, @10:51AM
Almost all of these suits are libel suits. They almost all claim that the Reviewer was intentionally and falsely reporting bad service in order to damage the Company's business prospects. In this case, that is certainly based on the linguistic distinction between "we provide up to 20 Mbps" and "my connection speed averaged 6.5 Mbps."
It works like this: the company gets to use the phrase "up to" to legally shield themselves from claims of poor bandwidth, but any subscriber bandwidth claims are measured against that theoretical maximum with all modifiers stripped out. It seems to be pretty standard legal tactic to leverage the exact wording of your own claims while simultaneously pretending to misunderstand your counterparty's claims. It's almost always funny when it comes out in public.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04 2014, @10:11PM
If free speech is dead, why did it win in this case? LOLOL derrrrrrrrrr