So lately my phone/DSL bills have been looking a little different. I didn’t think much of it.
Then one day I went to log on to “My Yahoo”. It’s where I usually go to check what movies are playing locally. It routes me to a page that says that SBC has merged with Yahoo and I need to “upgrade” my serivice at “no cost” if I want to reach My Yahoo. Fuck it. I’ll just look in the newspaper then.
Today I get a letter in the mail- an important looking one. They say that if I want to keep my DSL acount “active”, I need to “upgrade”.
I know all about this “upgrade”. It offers “features” like a “custom browsing environment” and “premium services” and “spyware” and “glutware” and “If I wanted to cover my desktop in shortcuts, have my favorites hijacked, destroy my browser and bring my computer to a crawl I would have signed up for mother fucking AOL ware” I’ve seen one to many of my friend’s computers fucked in every computery orfice it has by this oh-so-nifty “upgrade”.
Look, I got DSL. That means I plug in my modem, plug in my router, plug in my computer, fire up my browser and be done with it. Really, all I want is a connection to the Internet. I can figure out the rest from there, I promise. I don’t need to open up my huge and shiny “premium browser environment”, have it tell me “you have new mail” in some cheery voice as it offers me more “premium services” (like auctions and instant messeging! How unique and useful! Can’t find that anywhere else on the Internet!) and quietly sends reports back to headquarters about what brand of toilet paper I buy online and reconfigures very intimate and sacred bits of my system.
And you will rot SBC-Yahoo. You will rot in the deepest depth of the most hellish of hells before I click on that shiny “upgrade now or die” button. I will go back to dial-up before that. I’ll go back to snail mail- or heck, smoke signals- before I let you strongarm me into your evil plot to turn the whole world into an AOL/MSN style pit of torment.
You might want to look around at other threads there as well- the SBC Yahoo “migration” has been a hot topic, but there’s also a lot of helpful info specific to your ISP.
Quick note: You don’t actually have to upgrade your whatever to get to My Yahoo. Right at the top you can just click on ‘continue to Yahoo’ or whatever. It’s just a click-through ad.
My ISP, Qwest, used to offer good service. It’s cheap ($14 per month), always works, I can stay connected for weeks at a time, and it offers POP e-mail and a good news server. Then what happens? THEY SELL ME TO FUCKING MSN. They now want me to give up my POP e-mail and news server, switch to their proprietary browser and dialer, and pay $25 a month for the privilege. I’ll be switching to a local ISP that charges $19 a month for unlimited access with no proprietary crap, and offers v.92 access to boot.
I did the ‘upgrade’ about a month ago. I haven’t noticed any ‘glutware’ or ‘spyware’. The default home page is kinda fancy, and actually has local movie theatre listings. I have not gotten around to ‘re-personalizing’ however.
I would suggest you do the upgrade, which I think you will be forced to do pretty soon. Then reset the default homepage to your old startup page.
There has not been any price increase for my SBC Yahoo DSL service-yet.
What I find suspicious in my case is that they can’t seem to force me to upgrade for some reason. Normally, they could just say, we’re changings things, you have to change your settings or you won’t have e-mail access. In this situation, they are practically begging me to switch over, with multiple e-mails and mailings. Very interesting…
If you have My Yahoo arranged to your liking, you might want to take a look at My Page. They say that you can build a customized page, like Yahoo, etc, but that it won’t have banner ads and pop-ups. You can import links and settings from MSN or Yahoo. My Page seems ok to me, but I’ve only been using it a couple of weeks, and have tested few of their features.
My gripe is that when I signed up, you get to choose two free premium services. I opted for two webspace options, totaling (I think) 300 MB. Which would be great, so I can store my larger photos there and set up a site to host music made by my friends’ bands.
“Oh, by the way, you can’t use FTP- you have to use our shitty upload-through-your-browser utility and you can’t upload any one file that’s bigger than 10 MB.”