Time Warner Cable gets a bum rap on the Web

As best as I can tell, news of the supposed fast one Time Warner was pulling on customers originated with a blog called Stop the Cap!, which posted the "new" contract language May 28 and warned that "for the first time" the company had laid the groundwork "to introduce usage caps, tiered usage rate plans, overlimit fees" and other customer-unfriendly moves.

Stop the Cap! said it was alerted to the contract language by a reader named Oscar, who "noticed a tiny message on his most recent bill from Time Warner Cable stating the company had 'updated' their Subscriber Agreement."

It didn't take long for other blogs to pick up on the story and report it as fact.

In a breathless posting last weekend, the Consumerist said that "Time Warner has revised their Subscriber Agreement to lay the legal foundation needed to implement consumption based billing."

It said that even though the company had backed off from this plan in April, Time Warner "clearly has no intention of letting such a potentially massive cash cow escape from the paddock."

The tech site GigaOM also reported the contract change as a done deal and warned that the new language was "directed at legitimizing the cable company's ability to throttle and measure a consumer's bandwidth," and that "the new additions to the agreement also sanction tiered pricing."

The original posting on Stop the Cap! was written by the site's founder, Phillip Dampier. I sent him an e-mail pointing out Time Warner's denial that the language was new.

Dampier replied that "we are not saying this means consumption billing has been implemented." But he reiterated that the contract language "lays the groundwork to allow it to occur under the terms and conditions subscribers agree to today."

In any case, Dampier updated his blog post after our e-mail exchange. He now maintains that the important thing isn't when the offending language first appeared in Time Warner's contract, but what it could mean for customers in the future.

"Bottom line, there is an open question about the exact date the changes were made, but not about the substance of those changes and their implications," Dampier wrote.

GigaOM also updated its blog post after I queried the writer about its contents. Like Stop the Cap!, the revised posting sidestepped the question of timing, which was central to the original post, and focused instead on the implications of the contract language.