Back in the 1970s, Southwest Bell (now ATT) came out with a new whiz-bang motto intended to endear itself to its customers:

“We may be the only phone company in town, but we try not to act like it.”

Naturally, being the only phone company in town, they acted like it with every turn of the knife in their customers’ backs.

According to a long, but enlightening, article in “Business Week”, today’s ATT is doing everything in its power to ACT like the only phone company in town for iPhone customers.

Oh wait, it IS the only phone company in town for iPhone customers.

You’ve probably heard about Operation Chokehold, an iPhone customer rebellion intended to lock up ATT’s wireless phone network on Dec 18, 2009. It was cancelled because the the chief of public safety and homeland security at the US Federal Comminications Commission warned that it was “irresponsible.”

It sounds to me suspiciously like another example of how “homeland security” always trumps the legitimate needs or wishes of American citizens when they get in the way of a large corporation’s profit margin.

Don’t you wish you were an invaluable “homeland security” asset so you could cry foul when your customers demand that you honor your legally-binding contracts? Or maybe you’d like to get a “Mr Chertoff Deal”, where you can force all airline customers to get virtually naked in public so your clients can sell their spiffy X-ray machines to the government.

Personally, I don’t own an iPhone, not just because I don’t see its utility to me, but because iPhones are locked into a two year contract with ATT. I’m guessing that most iPhone owners didn’t have 50+ years of experience with ATT under their belts when they bought their iPhone.

Here’s a quote from the “Business Week” article about poor ATT not being able to make a profit – if they were to offer their customers the service they said they’d provide:

“If AT&T were to triple its capital spending on wireless, the value of an iPhone customer to the company would be halved. A sixfold increase in spending would make all iPhone customers worthless to AT&T.”

What that means in Simplified English is: If we have to give you what your contract says we’re gonna give you, then we don’t need you and your iPhone.

To put it into even Simpler English: If ATT had been giving their iPhone customers what they legally agreed to give them, their customers couldn’t have crashed anything, and emergency phone calls would have gone through just fine.

Now, you go try to get out of your ATT iPhone contract without getting hit with an outrageous charge to your credit card. Kinda funny that ATT not fulfilling their side of the contract doesn’t have any effect at all on them, isn’t it?

Yes, it’s just hilarious that corporate profits can be a homeland security issue.