Keeping up with Verizon's sneakwrap changes

The fact that online service providers expect you to check in periodically to see if they've made any changes to their Terms of Service (ToS) is already an old, bad joke. But if you're in the mood for a really bad joke, take a look at what's involved in really tracking those changes even if you wanted to try. Even when a vendor like Verizon at least goes through the motions of giving its customers some form o

The reader tried to comply, but the task proved a little daunting. "I went to the Verizon Online policies website and found that there were about 50 printable pages of policies to be read there, all in legalese of course," he wrote. Actually, by my count (for my zip code, so your results may vary), there are 14 documents, 87 pages, 33,083 words, and 204,869 characters. Not all of the documents are going to pertain to every Verizon Online customer, but the only way you're going to know that for sure is to read them all. And 33,000 words is the length of a short novel - for comparison, the "Old Man and the Sea" is about 26,500 words, "Animal Farm" is 29,000, and "The Call of the Wild" is 37,000 - all of them slightly easier reading than the Verizon lawyers' prose. So trying to follow Verizon's suggestion would have made a significant dent in the reader's weekend.

It's something of an aside, but one provision did catch my eye as I was copying the files to do word counts. The Verizon Internet Access ToS is governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia. I'm not quite sure why that would be - Verizon itself is headquartered in New York and the contact address provided for Verizon Online is in Florida. While I assume there's a good reason in Verizon's complicated history for choosing Virginia law, my long-time readers will know what this means. Virginia and Maryland are the only states that enacted UCITA, a law that makes enforceable even the most outrageous terms in sneakwrap "contracts" like Verizon's ToS. (To learn more about why UCITA was rejected by all the other states - to the point that some have passed laws protecting their citizens against UCITA - visit the AFFECT coalition website at www.ucita.com.)

Perhaps a few masochists would be willing to read Verizon's book-length set of legal documents once a year or so, but Verizon makes changes to its ToS a lot more frequently than that. Its announcement page shows four previous changes just since last June. The one on June 14th was particularly worthy of being brought to the attention of customers, since it was supposed to "clarify that Verizon reserves the right to limit or restrict bandwidth usage or take other action to enforce usage limitations we may establish from time to time for the Service." This change was made at the same time that Verizon knew it was being investigated by the state of New York for cutting off some broadband customers who had exceeded secret usage limits on what Verizon marketed as an "unlimited" service.