David Lazarus, a columnist for San Francisco Chronicle might have messed with the Texas one too many times. Tweaked by his writings, SBC has decided to pull all the advertising from San Francisco Chronicle (about $5 million.) How quaintly old fashioned! John Battelle reports on the ongoing saga and warns Google, “Because this is your new competitor, Google. Get to know them. As you offer free WiFi to all of San Francisco … and undermine AT&T/SBC’s broadband business …hard ball players like SBC are going to go after you, and rest assured, their motto ain’t “don’t be evil.” “
10 comments so far
11:30 PM PT
More power to Google. I live here in Dallas and I keep getting bogus charges on my SBC phone bill.
FCC’s Sheriff Martin will be here just down the road a few miles on Friday in Keller, the first sight for Verizon’s FIOS/fiber roll-out. It’s gonna be a good-ole fashioned shoot-out. We got everyone comin to town - cable guys, phone guys and FIOS wranglers. Gonna be a big fight in front of the main saloon over state-wide land rights, er mean TV rights. Plenty to be settled by Sheriff Martin and his gang of lawyers. Reckon there’ll be some Googlin going on somewhere in the ruckus.
11:35 PM PT
rick
maybe you can blog martin’s visit with your camera phone and ask him some tough questions. would love to get an onsite report on his visit?
1:53 AM PT
Tx has already granted a state-wide franchise to the telcos, so only the cable guys will be complaining. Rick, maybe you can ask Martin about some of the nasty comments that Ed Whitacre has been making of late.
2:02 AM PT
Check out the latest salvo from the Verizon camp.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/06/AR2006020601624.html
7:27 AM PT
Seems to me I remember Google pulling the same attitude with ZiffDavis when they wrote an article about how much information you can find by using Google. Didn’t they get banned for a year (which was later dropped?)
8:35 AM PT
I would certainly be there to check it out if I could get off my day job. or if it’s in the evening.
9:00 AM PT
more power to Lazarus! We need more journalists with guts like him to tell it like it is. AT&T/SBC are a terrible company for the consumer - they need to keep the blanket advertising going to disguise their ‘billing horror story’ word of mouth reputation so their pulled advertising will hurt them also.
11:10 AM PT
Maybe it’s SBC (oops, I mean ATT) that should be worried. If Google decided to drop them from its search results wouldn’t they effectively disappear from the face of the earth?
12:53 PM PT
Nothing is stopping Telco from comming up with innovative new services. Maybe they should put their effort into creating value for the customer instead of created headaches
3:39 PM PT
Well we wouldn’t want the whole city of SF having free wi-fi now would we? It sure would be a shame to see all those people drop their SBC DSL wouldn’t it?
Trying to influence journalism by flexing advertising dollars is wrong.
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