Heavy data users have two new options: pay $120 per month for 100 megabytes of international data use or $200 for 200 megabytes. Previously, AT&T announced a 20-megabyte plan for $25 and 50-megabyte plan for $60 plan. A word of caution: Those fees are in addition to what customers already pay to use the phone in the United States.

AT&T says customers can cancel whenever they want, but there are caveats. If you are overseas for only a week, you still have to pay for the whole month — an AT&T spokesman said the company doesn’t prorate the fees. And if you forget to cancel the plan after you get home, you will continue to be charged. AT&T won’t let you specify ahead of time when you want the international plan to end.

(Photo by AP/Paul Sakuma)

But I disagree with my esteemed colleague Kit Eaton at Gizmodo on one thing: AT&T's network is indeed the iPhone's weak spot. At least 50 percent of the U.S. population lives in an area not served by AT&T 3G. Even David Pogue's iPhone musical called out AT&T service quality as a minus. Verizon's EVDO network — which reaches 80 percent of Americans, per the cheat sheet — would be a much better match. Someday.

AT&T is already huge provider of telco and IT services to small business. Its track record is one of notoriously complex business processes that get in the way. If you schedule a "turn-up" to activate a new T1 line, you'll learn more than you want about AT&T internal politics. If your onsite technician doesn't show, your attempt to track him down gets ping-ponged around AT&T's org chart. Could be he has the wrong phone number or address. Could be he checked you off as done and took a vaca, as happened to Valleywag editor Paul Boutin's home-office installation. To AT&T, it's your problem. "Sorry, we have no available slots to reschedule until next week."

Want to get a reverse DNS record created, so you can send mail to EarthLink and Comcast without being spam-filtered? AT&T's answer: We can't do that unless we take over your DNS hosting entirely.

I don't expect the company's attempt to expand into home service to change its corporate culture. Instead, I pity ConnecTech's frontline support people. God help them when they try to explain AT&T bureaucracy to people who've been spoiled by FedEx.

In 1983, Knight Ridder and AT&T joined to launch videotext service Viewtron. Anybody with a dedicated terminal, phone line, and $12 a month could access news from the Miami Herald and the New York Times, online shopping, banking and food delivery, via a 300-baud modem. Norman Morrison, one of the subsidiary's VPs, said: "We're at the beginning of home information technology. We are dancing naked on the stage of history." Knight Ridder recorded a loss of $16 million on the project in 1984. Viewtron claimed as many as 3,100 subscribers before Knight Ridder folded the service in 1986. An impressive number considering all that equipment cost between $600 and $900. Bet it would've been more popular if it'd had porn.

In 1995, Knight-Ridder, Tribune, Times Mirror, Advance Publications, Cox Enterprises, Gannett, Hearst, Washington Post, and the New York Times each contributed $1 million to create New Century Networks in 1995. None of them actually wanted any part of it. The opening paragraphs of BusinessWeek's 1998 article on the fiasco best captures the mood.

It was created with a name most of its owners disliked, with a logo one partner ''hated,'' in a city everybody rejected, with a mission nobody understood. So it was fitting that when New Century Network was kicked off last April by nine media giants teaming up to conquer electronic competition, even the launch party bombed. In a ballroom at the Newspaper Association of America convention in Chicago, a thousand bottles of champagne emblazoned with ''New Century Network: The Collective Intelligence of America's Newspapers'' awaited the hordes expected to come to toast the watershed new-media joint venture. When fewer than 100 people showed up, Chief Executive Lee de Boer made an abbreviated speech before retreating.

The papers sunk $25 million more into New Century Networks before it folded in 1998, laying off 40. Perhaps it was for the best, says a disgruntled vet: "Even had New Century worked, it still would have been something like Google News and that's not exactly the best business ever." Which is funny because Google claims Google News indirectly generates $100 million a year for the company and doesn't crow about it much. These guys? It would've been more naked dancing on stages and things.

After participating in New Century Networks, the now defunct newspaper publisher Knight-Ridder launched Real Cities in September 1999, intending it to be a network of local portals featuring "news, email, search services, e-commerce, and site-building tools," according to PC World. In an article titled "Knight Ridder and New Media: If You Can't Beat 'Em...," Richard Siklos, then at BusinessWeek, wrote

Analysts applaud Knight Ridder's strategy, but some wonder if its network of local sites will ever gel, and they figure Real Cities will someday have to be merged into a bigger entity.

Knight Ridder ignored the pessimists and committed to investing $25 million in its new online business. "I live in terror that some big thing's going to happen that I don't see coming," Knight Ridder New Media President Bob Ingle told BusinessWeek. What Ingle didn't envision: nothing happening. Users didn't flock to Knight Ridder's localized portals. They start their Internets on AOL or Yahoo in Des Moines and by clicking into the Google search box everywhere else. Knight Ridder was eventually sold to McClatchy for $4.5 billion in 2006. Last week, McClatchy sold Real Cities to Centro, a local-media buying agency, for an undisclosed — read: embarrassingly low — amount. Maybe just enough to cover this year's wages?

Before there was Yahoo Answers, where users post questions for other users, there was a similar service from the New York Times called Abuzz, which the Gray Lady acquired in 1999 for a modest-by-bubble-standards $30 million. In January 2001, the Times shuttered the service and laid off 70 staffers, citing an "unexpected slackening of advertising revenue." That was the service's only failure, says a person familiar with the project:

They shut it down after the bubble burst, even though they could have kept growing it, for just the cost of the servers. The Times was always nervous about quality. It was user-generated content, not high-quality editorial and this was before they got down in the dirt with About.com. If they had just left it alone, it would have been ENORMOUS by now

Even when you can't sell adds on ENORMOUS, it's still good. Google News doesn't serve ads. Maybe Abuzz could have referred traffic to NYTimes.com like Google News does to Google. Google calls that trick $100 million. You know what the newspaper's call revenue gimmicks like that? They can't remember.

Founded in 1997 and still operating today, Classified Ventures operates Cars.com, Homescape, Apartments.com, RentalHomesPlus, and HomeGain. It's owned by McClatchy, Belo, Gannett, Tribune and the Washington Post, and is probably the newspaper industry's most successful online venture. That's not saying much. On December 30, 2007, part-owner McClatchy told the SEC its 25.6 percent stake in Classified Ventures was worth $99.3 million. In a filing last week, McClatchy said its stake was now worth $86.5 million — a 13 percent drop in half a year. Craigslist, eBay's Kijiji, and even Facebook allow their users to list cars, apartments, and other goods for sale for free, threatening the paid-classifieds business online and in print.

Oh, and Yahoo's Newspaper Consortium? Don't get us started. Or do.

(Photo by DRB62)

His strong opinions in the network neutrality debate may have something do with contributions from Internet service providers like Verizon and AT&T, which are respectively third and fifth on the list of largest contributors to his current re-election campaign, both ahead of oil industry services company Veco. He also counts News Corp. and Disney as top donors, and has championed broadcast flag provisions that would have required electronics manufacturers to bar users from recording digital audio or video flagged by rightsholders.

The investigation by the Department of Justice has been going on for four years, having raided the senator's remodeled home last year. But it's clear that corporations have known that Senator Stevens's vote has been for sale for some time now. The bad news alone might spell doom for the senator's re-election campaign, which would count as good news for open Internet advocates — the Democratic challenger, Anchorage mayor Mark Begich, is a strong supporter of network neutrality legislation.

Any California customer of the five ISPs already signed on in New York is included in the restrictions. For customers, the initiative's inability to target porn-serving newsgroups means the loss of access to many innocent newsgroups. But there are countless workarounds for Usenet users, a demographic dominated by technical types, to get access. For Cuomo et al., the initiative sounds so good on paper that they don't have to even bother making it work.

Anti-trust officials need to step in to protect the nascent but prospering online market from the ravages of a Robber Baron like monopoly.

The American Corn Growers Association has also been actively lobbying against network neutrality. Coincidence? The NBCC, founded by CEO Harry Alford (pictured here wearing a festive $100 bill tie), took the position that the Justice Department didn't go far enough in punishing Microsoft for antitrust violations. However, it has sided with AT&T and Comcast against network neutrality, a cause favored by Google, in the past. Why would a major corporation ask ACGA, NBCC or latino IT workers to lobby on its behalf? Because then you can accuse opponents of hating farmers, black business owners and hispanic techies, respectively. Full release after the jump.

National Black Chamber of Commerce questions Google-Yahoo partnership

Washington, DC – In response to reports that Google will merge operations with Yahoo!, Harry Alford, President and CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, issued the following press statement:

"There is no denying that the proposed partnership between Google and Yahoo! would create a de facto online gatekeeper, raising prices for small businesses seeking to grab a piece of the growing online marketplace. The companies have argued that they don't "set" ad prices, but when all would-be advertisers are forced to participate in the same auction prices will skyrocket and smaller players can be more easily shut out. As minority businesses make quantum leaps within the uniquely egalitarian online market, this alliance represents a painful step backwards, towards monopoly and away from diversity. Anti-trust officials need to step in to protect the nascent but prospering online market from the ravages of a Robber Baron like monopoly."

NBCC is dedicated to economically empowering and sustaining African American communities through entrepreneurship and capitalistic activity within the United States and via interaction with the Black Diaspora. NBCC represents 95,000 Black owned businesses and provides an advocacy that reaches all 1 million Black owned businesses.

No wonder AT&T is taking so many steps to make life difficult for people who try to buy an iPhone without a contract. Some bloggers are fussing about the fact that AT&T will no longer offer a prepaid plan for those with poor credit. What about those solvent enough to deserve an iPhone 3G? After AT&T and Apple get done with them, I wonder what their credit rating will look like.

First, Paul Baran discusses his invention of packet-switching while working at the Rand Corporation, which allowed for data to route through multiple nodes on a network, and the reception it received by then-monopoly AT&T:

The one hurdle packet switching faced was AT&T. They fought it tooth and nail at the beginning. They tried all sorts of things to stop it. They pretty much had a monopoly in all communications. And somebody from outside saying that there’s a better way to do it of course doesn’t make sense.

Less than thirty years later, it was Microsoft's turn to play the heavy with their Windows monopoly when meeting with Marc Andreesen and the rest of the team at Netscape's offices in the Valley, as told by Netscape's counsel at the time Gary Reback:

A group of Microsoft executives came down to Netscape and had a meeting, and the Microsoft people in effect said that if you’re going to make a browser that can serve as a platform for new applications it’s going to be all-out war with us.

As a last ditch effort, they were going to go all porn with 'CarnalTV.' They lost the last of their talent at this point because they didn't want to work for a porn company.

• Internet service providers: Comcast is a cable provider and AT&T has its U-Verse and HomeZone IPTV offerings, and both companies have their own set-top boxes and on-demand movie and television offerings. Plus the two generally compete only against each other in many markets. Which means neither has much of an incentive to increase speeds to those that could provide the Roku box with the HDTV signal it reportedly supports. Comcast has shown that it will throttle bandwidth for specific applications, and then lie about it to the FCC.
• Movie studios: I've used the Netflix feature to watch movies online and the selection isn't particularly impressive. Reports peg available titles at 10,000, with a handful of television shows thrown in. Netflix will have to go over the heads of the DVD distributors it has relationships with directly to the studios if it wants current content.
• Surly adopters: Fool me once with Akimbo, the Apple TV, or Unbox over TiVo, shame on you. Fool me twice with the Roku? Shame on you. The gadgetophile market is probably wary of cluttering their home theaters with yet another clunker. The key will be to get the chipset Roku has developed for the box built into new TVs. Only then can Netflix count on the kind of mainstream audience that will convince the studios and the ISPs that the project can't be ignored.

[G]ive us the ability to preempt that illegal activity where it comes through a choke point as opposed to the point where it is diffuse on the Internet.

AT&T can save the Internet from certain doom, if it's just left alone to build new fiber-optic lines for its exclusive use. If AT&T doesn't get its way in making sure laws aren't passed that mandate "network neutrality" and limit AT&T's control over Internet traffic on its network, it will pick up its cables and go home, Cicconi is more or less implying. Why don't we hear Google's top lawyer, David Drummond, going around threatening to take away our Web searches if he doesn't get his way in Washington? Because Drummond's not as good as his job.

The odd thing: Why would AT&T, Google, or Microsoft pay anything for Jingle? All of them have launched or acquired free directory services in the past year. AT&T is the most logical buyer, since its Ingeniu unit, which reports up to executive Ray Wilkins, actually sells ads for Jingle. Letting it go to Microsoft or Google would mean losing an outlet for its pay-per-call ads.

"I would say Google wins this one," says our source. "Google would do anything to take a stab at Ray Wilkins," a feud that dates back to AT&T's acquisition of Ingenio. That's always the most entertaining reason for an acquisition: not profit, but revenge.

The D-Block is still up for sale, so Google could still pick up a slice of nationwide bandwidth for $1.3 billion. Though the search giant would have to build out coverage for at least 75% of the population in four years, plus share it with emergency services and other public agencies, and we all know how successful Google's been at working with public officials on wireless infrastructure projects. (Photo by Omid Tavallai)

AT&T exec Susan Johnson said she hopes the fund will focus on "mobile opportunities." Siminoff told the Times the historical friction between Los Angeles and SIlicon Valley won't be a problem. "The ethos of this fund is about reducing the friction," he said. "Hollywood people are not stupid. They are just not technology people." That line of argument will be a tough sell in the Valley.

The plans will be available to new and existing wireless subscribers for $99.99 a month for unlimited U.S. calling on all devices ... Existing customers can choose unlimited calling without extending their contract. New customers have the option of a month-to-month, 12 or 24 month contract.