Go to the site and read their stories. The growth of these "mycompanysucks.com" Internet sites -- and this isn't the only one (See cybergriping.com) -- shows the power of the Internet to give small speakers an unfiltered voice and an opportunity to organize at low-cost. It also shows, of course, that consumers are getting fed up with the impersonal, arrogant, over-priced and nuisance-fee-laden so-called services of banks, airlines, cable companies, phone companies and other behemoth firms. And while companies use phalanxes of lawyers to try and take down the sites using copyright and other legal arguments (but mostly blustery threats designed to intimidate), Paul Levy of the Public Citizen Litigation Group has been leading efforts to protect the First Amendment free speech rights of consumers to complain.

Under deregulation, market competition, rather than pesky bureaucratic regulators, is supposed to restrain the most unfair tendencies of large, powerful corporations. But it doesn't seem to be working. Many firms use Early Termination Penalty fees and other tactics, including counting on consumers not wanting to pay the high switching costs (lost time in phone calls, getting new account numbers and new email addresses, waiting on new equipment service calls, or whatever) of switching providers, to establish a virtually captive customer base so they don't need to have good service to compete.

But Comcast at least, didn't count on Mona, who took the hammer into her own hands. She's not the first, and she won't be the last, consumer to take direct action. Corporations need to wake up. Consumers who pay good money for service deserve a better deal than the pathetic, impersonal treatment many get. Consumer complaints about bad service are not isolated incidents -- bad service is economy-wide (previous blog).