Verizon and MCI: Email Refuser to Acquire Email Abuser   - 1,948 Views, 1 Comment

Verizon has been in the news quite a bit lately, and indeed here in Aunty’s own column, for its dunderheaded refusal of email from large chunks of the civilized world, by blocking incoming email from entire countries. In fact, Verizon is being sued by their users who have been unable to receive wanted email from other countries.

MCI, on the other hand, has been in the news concurrently for, it is alleged, hosting spam gangs and “making $5million dollars a year” from said hosting, according to UK-based SpamHaus, a well-respected anti-spam company which is generally careful and conservative with whom they label “spammers”.

Today it has been announced that Verizon is set to acquire MCI, for a cool $6.75 billion dollars. Of course, if the SpamHaus allegations are true, Verizon should recoup its investment in short order just from the spamgang customers alone (and given the timing of the announcements, it’s pretty clear that if Verizon didn’t consider the spammer income a bonus, they at least didn’t seem to care about the alleged spamnest problems of their intended).

More interesting to Aunty, however is that she sees this as a case of life imitating lilfe.

As in many marriages, Aunty suspects that in this union one party is going to talk - a lot - and the other is just going to tune them out. Or will Verizon accept the spam from its customers-in-law?

In any case, let’s hope that they have a good prenup.