AOL continues an interesting trip that took them from one of the largest and most powerful ISPs on the Internet, to a fractured and financially-troubled company with dreams of becoming an advertising giant. Of course most of their problems were caused by their inability to adapt to (or really in some cases even recognize) the broadband market -- something that was at least in part caused by former executive Lisa Hook, who went on to do amazing things with VoIP carrier SunRocket as well. With its spin off from Time Warner, the company this fall has undergone its latest in an endless line of evolution efforts, but has announced those changes will come with pink slips for about one third of AOL's employees, or about 2,300 workers.

The CRTC earlier this year couldn't be bothered to come to the defense of independent ISPs facing extinction due to Bell Canada's sudden throttling efforts, but the regulatory agency amazingly came alive this week to stop the entry of a new wireless phone competitor in Canada. A CRTC ruling has banned Globalive, a new entrant into the Canadian market, from doing business in Canada. Why? because it's 61% owned by Orascom, a telecom company that does ample business in the Middle East, Africa, Europe and South Asia.

Canadian regulation, lobbied for by incumbent companies, prohibits any telecom networks that aren't majority-Canadian owned. The entry of WIND would be the first major threat to Bell Canada, Telus and Rogers in more than a decade, so the companies lobbied the CRTC extensively to investigate and ban Wind's market entry. Wind Mobile has issued a press release saying that the ruling's odd, given another Canadian agency had already given them the green light, they were already allowed to purchase spectrum, and they were well into the process of employing 500 people and setting up operations:Canadian Law Professor Michael Geist blames the entire affair on outdated pseudo-patriotic regulation, being a bit too kind to the CRTC (stocked with phone industry executives) and Canada's incumbent phone giants (who lobbied for the original restrictions and initiated the investigation in the first place). Mike Masnick at Techdirt gets to the point, noting how such pseudo-patriotic moves are usually just another form of protectionism that ultimately winds up crippling competition and harming consumers, be it in the U.S., Canada, or Tajikistan.

The unions employees who warned regulators that Fairpoint wasn't equipped to handle the acquisition of Verizon's New England DSL and landline networks last year are rightfully saying "we told you so." As Fairpoint teeters toward possible bankruptcy, union officials tell Vermont locals that they can thank Verizon for all the fun everyone's having. Instead of simply selling to the highest bidder, Verizon used a Reverse Morris Trust to incur huge tax savings while dumping a huge debt load on Fairpoint. That debt load may ultimately be what crushes Fairpoint: story continues..

Users of the T-Mobile Sidekick have been writing in to complain about a week-plus outage, and now they're being informed that they'll be losing personal data as well. According to a post made over at the T-Mobile website and the Wall Street Journal, problems with Microsoft servers have resulted in a total data loss for any data not backed up on users' personal devices. How's Microsoft involved? Microsoft took over the guts of the Sidekick service and software when they acquired Danger Inc. early last year. The outage of course begs questions about the stability of the so-called "cloud" (though Oracle's CEO is one of many who think that's a dumb name for computers on a network), but it also begs the age old question: where was the redundancy?

Update:It appears that customers will at least be getting a month's service credit. T-Mobile is also halting sales of new service and is letting customers under contract cancel service without penalty.

There's been a growing call from investors like Craig Moffett for AT&T to ditch their $30 unlimited data plan and migrate to a pure per-byte billing model for the iPhone. Why? iPhone users like to use data, and higher overages means more money. Slate writer Farhad Manjoo has also now decided that AT&T should ditch their unlimited plan, penning a piece for Slate that places the blame for AT&T's network woes on consumers who like to use data, while arguing that AT&T should ditch their unlimited plans. Argues Manjoo: story continues..