.net article (15 September 1998) For reasons which are obvious to anyone who has read it, it was highly unsatisfactory. That said, nobody seems to read .net - we have only ever had one item of feedback about the article. Just after it was published Erol got in touch by phone with Richard Longhurst, the editor. After much discussion both sides entered into a four-part standoff: .net: We'll give you a right to reply and print any point-by-point rebuttal you come up with. CUT: We won't do this. It would be longer than the original article so you'd have to edit it and thus add your opinions to it, and we have better things to do - such as campaigning. .net: Then we can't do anything for you. CUT: How about covering the issue factually? After all, it is fundamentally important and affects all your readers. .net: We'll give you ... And so on, receding into the distance. We then contacted Ian Harris, who wrote the article. He was most apologetic, and said that he'd been told to write a negative article about unmetered calls because .net's competitor, Internet Magazine, was running a series of positive articles [we're not making this up]. But he had interviewed me in a most friendly and positive way beforehand, so he used what he'd got ... you know the rest. So now you see that .net magazine used what is probably the most important topic currently affecting UK Internet users as a weapon in a feud with another magazine. As the first person to read a draft of this news item said, 'What a bunch of children'. Postscript (8 November 1998): .net must have relented, because Susan Godfrey - one of their own journalists - asked me for an interview. In the end, it was Erol who was interviewed 'for about an hour' by her; I know she also contacted OFTEL, BT, Cable and Wireless Communications, Energis, Telecom Eireann (see news items) and The Direct Connection (one of the very few UK ISPs with 'unmetered subscribers'). We are hopeful of a better article.