2 Texans Down Under

A friend of mine called my attention yesterday to the incredible story of Comcast and “the hammer lady,” Mona Shaw, 75, folk hero.

I won’t repeat the story of how she and her husband were misused by this huge corporation, or how she took matters into her own hands by smashing some Comcast equipment at their Manassas, Virginia, office. You probably know it already and if you don’t, you can type her name into a search engine and get, as I did, a page full of reports mostly about her action plus 350,000 other sites to check.

A highly successful consultant to business leaders, my friend Kathy wrote, “As someone who is a creator of ‘Marketing Messages’…. it is my worst nightmare that customers would begin to utter a catch phrase I’ve developed for a client as a profanity.”

But now something like that is happening. Just as “going postal” was born and then added to our language, the term “being comcastic” has been coined and launched. One day soon, dictionaries may list this entry: Comcastic – “adj., behaving with insensitivity to and disregard for the interests of customers.”

Mona Shaw, as my friend Joe in Houston tells me, is much revered by several members of his Unitarian Universalist Church who have had unfortunate dealings with Comcast (the Shaws attend a Unitarian Universalist Church, according to the Washington Post). Joe has seen a pro-Mona political cartoon in the Houston Chronicle and a poster suggesting she should be the next US President.

Mona Shaw is the fun part of the story in this time of overweening corporate power. There is a more cynical tale, though, concerning Comcast, one that goes beyond atrocious service and incivility.

According to a coalition of consumer groups and legal scholars who have asked the Federal Communications Commission to stop Comcast Corp. from interfering with its subscribers’ file sharing, Comcast has been violating the Commission’s rule of “Net Neutrality.”

The company’s denials have been deemed by most geeks to be virtual admissions that say, “Well, yes, we have interfered with some downloads, but it’s for the good of everybody else, and if the person is persistent enough, we eventually let the download go through.”

Comcast is big here in Australia, as it is in the US, and both Mona Shaw and the company’s messing with Internet traffic flow are in the news down under.

Robert X. Cringely, in an opinion piece for “Computerworld,” noted that the technique Comcast has been found to be using seems to be one used earlier by the Peoples Republic of China to censor Net traffic.
Let’s hope, he says, that Comcast has no tanks.

Maybe there’ll be a second definition for Comcastic — “willing to delay or deny services to which customers are entitled. (See also ‘imperialistic’)” — Bob