Unlimited gall to cost Verizon $1 million

New York state has given Verizon Wireless a million new reasons to understand that the word “unlimited” when used in advertising should mean what it means elsewhere in polite society.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced last week that his office had beaten a $1 million “agreement” out of Verizon Wireless that will see the carrier compensate 13,000 customers it had summarily disconnected from their “unlimited” plans because they had taken the word to mean what it means.

Cuomo’s office found "that Verizon Wireless prominently marketed these plans as 'Unlimited,' without disclosing that common usages such as downloading movies or playing games online were prohibited. The company also cut off heavy Internet users for exceeding an undisclosed cap of usage per month."

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New York state has given Verizon Wireless a million new reasons to understand that the word “unlimited” when used in advertising should mean what it means elsewhere in polite society.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced last week that his office had beaten a $1 million “agreement” out of Verizon Wireless that will see the carrier compensate 13,000 customers it had summarily disconnected from their “unlimited” plans because they had taken the word to mean what it means.

Cuomo’s office found "that Verizon Wireless prominently marketed these plans as 'Unlimited,' without disclosing that common usages such as downloading movies or playing games online were prohibited. The company also cut off heavy Internet users for exceeding an undisclosed cap of usage per month."

A million bucks is essentially petty cash for a company this size -- the public-relations beating will likely prove more costly -- but the episode should nonetheless act as a deterrent for other carriers tempted to sprinkle their advertising with manure. At least that’s the theory.

As for Verizon’s take on the matter? Well, it was priceless:

"We are pleased to have cooperated with the New York Attorney General and to have voluntarily reached this agreement," a company spokesman told Associated Press. "When this was brought to our attention, we understood that advertising for our NationalAccess and BroadbandAccess services could provide more clarity."

See, it was all a big misunderstanding.

Here at Buzzblog we like to believe that we go out of our way to accept business-speak for what it is and to not immediately presume the worst about corporate intentions.

Such latitude, however, is not unlimited.

$2 a month? … Too much.

No one ever wants to pay anything for something they've been getting all along for free (hence the hokey old admonition about cows, milk and sex before marriage.)

So it should come as no surprise that 72% of respondents in a new survey by Parks Associates contend they would abandon their favorite social networking site altogether before paying a measly two bucks a month. The surprise is that almost 28% claim they would be willing to pony up.

But what people profess in polls and what they do in the privacy of their own Web browsers are not necessarily one and the same.

As predictable as that 72% may be, it says here that a bunch of those folks are not being truthful with themselves, the firm doing the poll or both, because if MySpace started charging $2 a month tomorrow there is no way in this or Second Life that three out of four MySpacers would just drop their precious pages and their friends like fifth-period French.

There would be caterwauling and a meaningful number of defections, but I'm thinking it's more likely that three out four would pay to stay than three out of four would walk.

Two bucks a month? Heck, even to teenagers that's chump change these days.

Of course, the difficulty both with such surveys and disputing their conclusions is that there is really no way to settle the argument short of one of these sites actually asking for $2 a month. That's unlikely.