Sprint Nextel (S), AT&T (T) at war with customers?

In the cutthroat world of wireless telephone service competition, low down and dirty tricks sometimes become the norm in the fight for every single customer. Unfortunately, the terms of service can lock customers into a bad marriage of sorts based on what many consumers find to be misleading language and contract legal-ese. And now, some wireless companies seem to be turning on their own customers. AT&T, Inc. (NYSE: T) recently claimed the right to cut off customers that criticize it publicly. Nice. Telecom censorship is exactly the kind of public image AT&T needs, eh?

Well, Sprint Nextel Corp. (NYSE: S) has been sued by the state of Minnesota for apparently extending consumers' contracts without their knowledge or permission. Are telecom companies so afraid of customer empowerment that they need to either lock customers down to contracts without their consent or boot them from services for posting a critical blog entry? In Sprint's case, a customer making a small change in a wireless calling plan automatically triggered a new two-year contract, which -- of course -- was not communicated to the customer when the new contract when into effect.

In AT&T's case, the company apparently does not want anything critical said about it (and all subsidiaries of BellSouth, to be exact) or the 'offending' customer can be cut off from AT&T's various services. Is this what the telecom industry has come to? The 'non-serving' of customers? Every company is going to make mistakes, but the speed and accuracy at which they correct them speaks volumes to the world. In some cases, however, the sneakiness factor related to pulling wool over consumers' eyes appears to be more important.