| CPNI In the old days, this was exactly the situation covered by the Computer Inquiries and specifically the Customer Proprietary Network Information rules. As originally crafted, CPNI rules were not privacy rules as much as they were anti competitive safeguards. The CPNI rules worked along these lines:
First, you have the telco, and the telco runs the telecom infrastructure and may offer enhanced services. There are other enhanced service providers but the telco is the only (as in monopoly) telecom infrastructure providers.
The Telco as a then monopoly is a bottleneck supplier for both its enhanced service provider and another enhanced service providers. Thus in the enhanced service provider market, the telco has a unique advantage over all the other enhanced service providers as being the sole source provider of a necessary input.
So here is how CPNI worked. The regulated telco could use regulated customer service information ONLY to market regulated services; the regulated telco could not use regulated customer information to provide unregulated - enhanced services.
Translation: The telco could use telephone information to market telephone service. The telco could not use telephone information to market its own enhanced service.
Example: If a customer orders "X", and "X" is a necessary input for enhanced services, the Telco may not use the info and opportunity to market its own enhanced service.
In the old days, dsl was a telco regulated service. A customer would go to the ACME ISP and order DSL Internet service. The ACME ISP would go to the telco and say, customer would like DSL installed from them to us. Telco would rule a truck and install the regulated-at-the-time DSL service.
Arguably, at that moment, if the telco truck guy said to customer, why are you getting DSL Internet from ACME for $49 a month when you could get it from Telco for $39, that would be a use of customer information in violation of CPNI.
That's the way it use to work.
See »www.cybertelecom.org/ci/cpni.htm |
