Just because I moved to the USA doesn't mean I don't keep up with the news and politics back home, so last months when I heard about the 'Telecom's Package' I wrote to my Member or Parliament about it.
The 'Telecom's Package' was another attempt for the big telecommunications companies to make themselves insanely rich while fucking up the internet for everyone else. They wants to offer 'tiered internet service'.
What this meant is that you'd get your basic internet service for the same price as now, but you'd pay extra on top of that for services like Skype. Plus, your monthly fee would buy you about 2 gigabytes of transfer…once you've used your 2 gigs, you'd be charged a couple dollars for every extra gigabyte. In other words, it gave them back their monopoly. Who would rent a movie through iTunes, when you'd have to pay for the movie, then another four or five dollars for overages? Who'd use skype if they had to pay twenty bucks a month for the privilege, with overages for the bandwidth again?
Basically, the Telecoms package meant we'd pay through the nose for anything other than absolute basic email and web browsing.
Well, today, about two weeks after the issue being settled (Luckily there was enough pressure to stop them), I received an email from my Member of Parliament. Here's the opening line:
"Thank you for your email concerning the free software pact."
No, thank you Mr. Brian Simpson! Thank you for replying to my email weeks after it would do any good and replying about a totally unrelated topic to the one I actually wrote to you about.
Nice to know that my European Member of Parliament, my representative, is so incompetent it takes him over a month to send a form letter and can't actually send the right one to the right person.
I'm looking forward to his next email where he tries to explain to me that the internet is not a big truck.
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