You would think, by now, that companies (especially big companies) would recognize that attacking customers who complain about service online is a strategy destined to backfire in a big bad way. And yet, it continues to happen. Vodafone India has apparently sent a legal nastygram to a customer who complained about crappy Vodafone service on Facebook, and tried to reach top management to get their attention. The story is made a bit more confusing by the guy complaining that Vodafone somehow has access to his "private" conversations, but (from the description in the article) it sounds like the guy might not have known that if you don't set conversations to private, then they're open to the public. Even so, the larger issue is the almost certain backlash for any company that threatens a customer (no matter how annoying) for complaining on Facebook or Twitter. Focus on fixing the problem, not attacking the messenger.

We've gotten used to various copyright industries spreading propaganda about copyright to school children. Nearly all the big copyright trade groups have "educational" curricula that are often not even close to accurate. They leave out things like "fair use" and they include blatantly false statements like "if you didn't pay for it, you stole it." Well, we didn't pay for your propaganda, so...

Still, it's a bit surprising to see others get into the copyright propaganda campaign as well. The latest, apparently, is telco giant Vodafone. Glyn Moody points us to the news that Vodafone Italy has started a typically inaccurate copyright propaganda campaign that makes false and misleading blanket statements like:

"[Parents and teachers should] explain to students that downloading and sharing a file protected by copyright is a crime"

Later on it repeats claims that all downloads without purchase or any download via P2P is illegal. But, of course, that's not true. It may be true in some, even many, cases. But that's not the same thing. If we're going to teach people copyright law, shouldn't it at least be accurate?

One issue that's constantly popping up these days is friction between distributors and content or service providers. Companies on either side of the equation often overvalue their contribution, whether it's movie studios thinking they have the leverage over Netflix, or ISPs thinking they've got the upper hand over the likes of Google when it comes to net neutrality because they "control" the pipe. The content or services are worthless without the distribution; without the content, the distribution is worthless. It's not the case where one side always has the power, and often over time, the balance of power shifts. Such is the case with the news that Vodafone UK has enabled Twitter SMS services for its customers. Twitter irritated some of its international users last year when it stopped sending them SMS updates because of the costs. It's a pretty typical story in mobile: if you have a service you want to offer to users via SMS, you've got to be prepared to pony up the cash to mobile operators to reach "their" customers. When Twitter was a nascent service used by web dorks and media types, somebody like Vodafone wouldn't care about it. But as the service has gone mainstream, suddenly it behooves Vodafone to strike a deal with Twitter, make the costs workable, and be able to offer the service to its customers. The mobile industry has long engaged in these stupid battles over who "owns" the customer. Typically, the operator's take has been that they own the pipe, so they own the customer. But maybe they're finally figuring out that without any compelling services to travel through it, the pipe's not such a big deal.

American mobile operators' advertising is still dominated by claims about their network coverage, from the "Can You Hear Me Now?" guy to consistent sniping about whose network is bigger. But in Europe, competing on coverage largely went out years ago, thanks to smaller geographic areas to cover and denser populations, while converging on a single technology didn't hurt, either. Some operators there have gone so far as to embrace network sharing, where they collaborate on their infrastructure with their rivals to cut costs. Vodafone and Telefonica have announced the biggest network-sharing deal so far, saying they'll jointly build new cell sites and consolidate existing ones in several countries across the continent. Network sharing is seeing renewed interest as operators look to trim their capital expenditures, but it can benefit consumers as well. In one sense, a lot of spending is duplicated by rival operators as they build out network footprints that are roughly equivalent; significantly reducing that cost would have a big impact on their businesses, and allow them to redirect some of those resources elsewhere. As a Telefonica exec says, "by reducing our costs in areas of the business that customers don't see, we can ensure that we invest in areas they truly value." Thus far, many operators' response to the commoditization of their product has been to try and differentiate on coverage; eliminating that factor could spur them to differentiate in other ways, such as with new and better services.

Vodafone boss Arun Sarin made some news for saying that the iPhone "a pretty poor experience," but apparently that hasn't stopped the company from sending out the lawyers when it wasn't allowed to sell them. Vodafone's German unit has convinced a judge there to ban the sale of iPhones by rival T-Mobile, claiming that Apple's exclusive deal with T-Mobile is somehow unfair. For such a poor experience, it certainly seems like Vodafone would have been happier if it had been Vodafone's poor experience, rather than competitors'.

A German court has apparently not only decided that it doesn't like bittorrent search engines, but that it's somehow illegal to advertise on one. Specifically, the court has banned the telco Arcor from advertising on the BitTorrent tracker site BitReactor.to. This seems odd for a variety of reasons. First of all, BitTorrent tracker sites are really no different than search engines, meaning that it's a bit of a stretch to claim that they're inherently illegal. But, more importantly, why should the court have any say in where a company chooses to advertise?

Northern Ireland's health minister has apparently met with social-networking site Bebo, mobile phone operator Vodafone and Google to ask them what they're going to do to help stop the growing number of teen suicides there. He says the suicide rate in Northern Ireland has grown significantly over the last year, and "the internet has been cited as a contributory factor in some cases." Certainly a growth in teen suicides deserves some action, but a more prudent step to take would be to examine the root causes of the problem, rather than taking the easy way out and blaming the internet. It's not clear what the minister wants of Vodafone, but it would seem pretty safe to assume he wants Bebo and Google to try and block or limit posts and information about suicide, as has been done before. Again, this seems rather pointless and a way to just distract people from the real, underlying issues that are causing suicides. Furthermore, some people think that trying to force suicide-related content offline can actually lead to more suicides. Blaming the internet for suicides, then working to get suicide-related content offline, is nothing more than attempting to gloss over the problem -- and shouldn't be mistaken for actually doing anything about it.