The other day I received an email appeal from Free Press, “a national, nonpartisan, nonprofit organization working to reform the media,” to urge the FCC to end unreasonable penalties for switching cell phone providers or cancelling service.

Free Press’ mobile phone campaigns fly under a “Free My Phone” banner and feature a cell phone angelically equipped with white wings. For this specific campaign, though, the phone has been retouched with an angry facial expression and the indecorous exclamation “ETF, WTF?” The ETF stands for the “early termination fees” charged by cell phone carriers. And you know what the WTF stands for.

Free Press is fuming that “carriers still force us to pay outrageous penalties — up to $350 — if we cancel our phone service or switch carriers. There’s one question on everyone’s mind: WTF?” (Not everyone may phrase it that way, but it’s certainly a good question why termination fees are so high. After all, if you want to cancel your cable service, providers don’t hit you with exorbitant fees.)

Apparently, the FCC is asking the same question (though, perhaps, without the “WTF?”) Read more…

Last week, we cancelled our cable TV service.  In one fell swoop, we went from 60 to 0.  No more DVR, HBO in HD, nor movies-on-demand.  Also gone: the extraneous 700 other channels that I never looked at.  For the first time since I was a college student, I wasn’t tethered to a coaxial connection.

I told Comcast, no hard feelings.  We kept their broadband and voice services.  I said, we needed more “breathing room” so I could work on my book (presently entitled Trust Me: How to Tell Stories in a Credibility-Starved World).

I was being truthful.  That said, that I’m also saving $1000 a year.  I’m ingesting content specific to my interests (streaming Hulu and Netflix through my Playstation 3).  And I’m putting the savings to media that matters most to me: public radio (KUOW, KEXP), the Seattle Times Sunday paper, and a dead-tree subscription to the Wall Street Journal.

Image from zeropaid.com

Thanks to three recent articles in that same Wall Street Journal, I now also believe there’s a higher purpose to this decentralization of my media choices.  Because once again, large institutions with a vested interest in maintaining their power aren’t too pleased that people like me are making such choices.

Read more…