I hate how the conversation goes when I ask them why they are adding fees to my bills that don't make any sense. (I intentionally own all my own equipment, why would I ever have an "equipment return fee" show up other than them trying to screw me over and see if I notice?) I complained to some friends that are very low on the totem pole and they agreed with me that DNS hijacking is extremely wrong but had zero power to do anything.
We need strong Regulatory Commissions to hold these sorts of Monopolists accountable, and right now the political climate in states like mine remains that "Regulations are Bad" and "Profit/Greed are Good".
I tried calling Earthlink about this once, back toward the beginning of the DNS hijacking craze. He didn't seem too familiar with it, and eventually matched it up in his script to something about redirecting web pages on typos. I tried to explain that I don't want to talk about the web, I want to talk about problems with their broken DNS servers, but it didn't really work.
Annoying and pointless conversation. I just cancelled.
I keep telling myself that one day when some company run this way does me wrong enough, I'm going to go score a pile of Adderall, some cell phones and a pack of Depends and patiently battle/harass my way through the entire scripted management hierarchy until the CEO himself gets on the phone, personally apologizes for the mishap and invites me to his birthday party.
Beyond a certain size of ISP (several tens of thousands of customers or more), there is literally no point in wasting your time or the phone representative's time. They'll have no clue what you're talking about and little or no power to escalate you to the people responsible for their internal network engineering decisions.
The right way, probably, is to educate folks, and nitpick w/ the sales guys. And call them out on the service's non-features, and/or if they lie. Once you're a customer, the support folks don't care, but the Sales folks are thirsty to close the sale.
