Utahns who get their internet service from CenturyLink are complaining about a recent interruption in their service, which included a pop-up ad for the company’s security filters.
CenturyLink claims the interruption was to give a security notice required by a recent Utah law — though even the Utah legislator who sponsored the law says the company didn’t need to cut into web service to deliver it.
Eric Rathofer said he was using his smartphone when it displayed an error message that said it couldn’t connect to his CenturyLink wireless connection. After about 30 minutes of trying to figure out the problem, Rathofer said, he went to his phone’s internet settings.
“That’s when I got redirected to CenturyLink’s web page, to the ads for their filters,” said Rathofer, from Taylorsvlle, who works as a senior project manager for a different telecom company.
When he called to complain, he said, the company first “tried to chalk it up to an internet outage.” This struck Rathofer — who has a master’s degree in information systems and served in the U.S. Army’s Signal Corps, “so I kind of know what I’m talking about” — as a stretch.
“How am I getting to your website through the wireless if it’s an internet outage?” he asked.
Then, Rathofer said, “they kept pushing it off on Utah government.” Specifically, CenturyLink was citing SB134, passed in the 2018 legislative session, requiring internet providers “notify in a conspicuous manner” their customers by Dec. 30 that they “may request material harmful to minors be blocked.”
The law specifies the notice can be done via email, through an insert in the customer’s bill or “in another conspicuous manner.”
In a statement to The Salt Lake Tribune, a spokeswoman for CenturyLink said, “We felt, given the gravity surrounding the protection of this most vulnerable population, the most conspicuous method of notification is a pop-up.”
State Sen. Todd Weiler, R-Kaysville, the law’s chief sponsor, took issue with CenturyLink’s choice. “SB134 did not require that — and no other ISP has done that to comply with the law,” he wrote on Twitter on Dec. 10. “They were only required to notify customers of options via email or with an invoice.”
Weiler was posting in response to another CenturyLink customer, Rich Snapp, who wrote in a blog post last week about an identical interruption on his CenturyLink service that cut out while he was watching TV through an Amazon FireTV stream.
Rathofer, who wrote about his experience in a Reddit post that drew comments from people who had the same thing happen to them, said he believes it’s no coincidence CenturyLink’s service block for a sales pitch comes just after the Federal Communications Commission revoked internet neutrality.
“If I was a gambling man, I’d put down quite a bit of money that they would pull this stunt again,” Rathofer said.
