Corvus Consulting

Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs, must be losing some sleep this week. Just six days ago he made in one of his posts a call for a ‘digital flash mob’. The goal: overload the AT&T 3G network in a protest response to the company’s grousing about Bandwidth Hogs. Now, the Bandwidth Hog is a mythological beast in the world of telecom and internet service providers. Spokespeople portray them with propagandistic rhetoric as an invisible enemy among us, greedily devouring fantastic amounts of bandwidth to the detriment of us fair-minded, simple folk. Invoking such a cheap device is condescending enough, but the real insult is that these companies consistently fail to produce evidence of actual bandwidth hogs.

But that doesn’t excuse Lyons from what he must be starting to see as a bad mistake. His Operation Chokehold has escaped the crystal prison of satire and threatens to run loose in our world. That’s right, Fake Steve found the silly old book of magic spells and thought it funny to read one calling forth the Bandwidth Hog from the demon dimensions. As if in a bad horror movie (or a great Buffy episode), the beast becomes real and is loosed upon the world.

In real terms, the stunt is little more than a crowdsourced denial of service attack, and the FCC has already commented to that effect. Moreover, one has to wonder how much damage this whole thing will do to the future of unlimited data plans; if Operation Chokehold demonstrates a risk exposure in unlimited plans, the telcos will have a great shield to hide behind as bandwidth caps and tiered access once again rule the day and destroy a huge user experience benefit that Real Steve Jobs brought in with the iPhone: that you don’t have to wonder about data limits when you use the device.

By invoking the ethos of the vandal with a ginned up crowd, Lyons went beyond satire, slapped on a pair of jean shorts and made the wonderful Fake Steve Jobs jump the shark.

What Dan could and should have done is tuned AT&T anger at the partner with the trump card: Apple. They’ve shown us that they can and will break carrier exclusivity by punishing Rogers/Fido here in the Canada just last month, so why not reach for the lever that seems to actually work to the customer’s benefit?
If Dan’s satirical voice does wane after this episode it’ll be a net loss, but like the Fonz nobody made him get on those waterskies.