Another day, a new story.

It’s always nice when a vice president of public relations for Time Warner decides to speak for Earthlink. Of course, Earthlink itself has not been doing any speaking themselves on the corporate level despite several attempts to reach them.

Earthlink forced to cap its service because Time Warner said so?

Brad, one of our regular readers, has been engaged in an e-mail back and forth with the Time Warner crowd trying to sell the “benefits” of their Internet rationing plan, and finally got a one sentence answer to a question he had to raise repeatedly.

Q. Are the caps going to apply to Earthlink service riding your infrastructure?

A. “Earthlink customers will be included.”

Earthlink customer service agents have insisted Earthlink was not going to cap their service, but as we indicated last week, customer service representatives are only reading from instructions handed down by their bosses.  We wanted to receive direct confirmation from Earthlink before we could definitively assure our readers on the question of caps with this alternative provider.

If Earthlink has their own contract for a provisioned level of service from Time Warner, it will be interesting to see if there is any push back from Earthlink.  The presence of Earthlink on Time Warner’s network came about from a settlement with the federal government in 2000.  Under the terms of the settlement, Earthlink was supposed to be granted the freedom to set its own pricing tiers.  The New York Times reported on the agreement and its parameters.

After the AOL and Time Warner merger deal, the companies said they would allow competition on Time Warner’s cable systems. But rivals complained that the terms they offered in initial discussions were unusually harsh. For example, the companies demanded that other companies not price high-speed access lower than AOL Time Warner’s own service.

Mr. Betty of Earthlink said that Time Warner had eliminated many of those restrictions.

Under the proposed agreement, he said, Earthlink can buy high-speed access from Time Warner and resell it to Earthlink customers at any price it chooses on its own bill. In reality, he said, that Earthlink’s service will probably cost about the $40 a month that Time Warner now charges for Road Runner.

Interestingly, with Mr. Dudley now apparently speaking on behalf of Earthlink, this may open a new question that the Federal Trade Commission may want to answer.  If Earthlink is allowed to set its own pricing, why is Time Warner now telling customers Earthlink will be capping?

While this news is not an absolute confirmation of Earthlink’s policy going forward, I’d say it rings warning bells for customers who absolutely need cap-free Internet access.  Frontier under a Price Protection Agreement is looking more and more like the safest bet in Rochester, and we’re still compiling a list of alternate providers in other affected cities.

Meanwhile, customers of Earthlink might want to go to Earthlink’s website and conduct a “support chat session” and ask them again about caps, capture the text from representatives insisting there isn’t any, and hang on to them.  It may provide some useful leverage later on, and StoptheCap! would like to document this whole sordid affair.  Earthlink themselves may have a case before the FTC if their original agreement is now being shown to be worthless in practice.

As the usage cap is many months away from being implemented, you can still drop Road Runner and hop onto Earthlink for the next six months and pay $29.95 a month for service, which will save you at least $10 a month, and feel the satisfaction of not supporting Road Runner or Time Warner’s price gouging.

We will continue to ask Earthlink corporate officials to comment.