"You also agree to pay for all charges for services provided under this agreement even if such calls were not authorized by you."

Regulators say this line makes it nearly impossible for customers to get out of paying for fraud or errors charged to their bill — even if they're added by AT&T.

"If you do not agree with the provisions of this agreement, your sole option is to cancel your services ... within 30 days after receipt of this agreement," it says.

I should've made it my lead: Quit now!

In an open letter, Hesse even quotes a schadenfreude-laced passage from Proverbs:

I will mock you when calamity overtakes you - when calamity overtakes you like a storm, when disaster sweeps over you like a whirlwind, when distress and trouble overwhelm you.

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 performance breaks down when Battelle quizzes Stephenson about the company's efforts to compete with cable-TV providers in delivering video to the home. Stephenson complains about local "franchise" regulations about video. Battelle points out that AT&T could simply provide an unregulated, high-speed Internet connection and start its own, separate Internet-video service. It could then compete openly to deliver TV shows and other video down that pipe. Stephenson looks puzzled — and then goes back to his canned talking point that local cable-TV regulations need to go away. He never answers Battelle's question. It's not clear if he even gets it. That's because, at the root, Stephenson is still running the Death Star of yore — the bad old AT&T that craves a monopoly.

Google would like people to think it's getting in the phone business. The mere prospect of Google as a competitor causes panic among entrenched phone and broadband providers like AT&T and Verizon, and accomplishes two important goals: One, it helps persuade those companies to bend to Google's public-policy whims, like "network neutrality." And two, it lets Google's sharky telecom purchasers negotiate better terms when they do buy fiber-optic capacity. (Serving up those YouTube videos does chew up a lot of bandwidth, after all.) By owning some of its own fiber, Google knows how much it really costs to run a network — and how to lowball its suppliers.