You know how it works: the sign-up process for a service is remarkably painless and quick; the process to cancel is much more difficult. I've had NetZero for many years as a dial-up Internet Service Provider (ISP). I signed up many years ago- well before I moved into my current residence. At the time, I simply needed a service provider and dial-up was my only option (DSL, while gaining ubiquity, hadn't yet made it into my home and I, a poor college student, could only afford the $10/month fees that many dial-up ISPs offered). I was happy with the service- in my experience the billing was accurate, the perceived connection stability and speed was more than sufficient- sufficient enough for dial-up, at any rate. All in all, I would recommend NetZero to anyone who needs a simple dial-up ISP account and nothing more.

The truth, though, is that I haven't actually connected into the web via my netZero service in something like three years. Just like going to the dentist and cleaning the basement, I've been meaning to cancel for some time now but just never got around to doing it- until today. You always hear of the horror stories of account cancellation- ridiculous hold times, unintelligible call center representatives, red tape that prevents a simple transaction from taking place. Perhaps it is to the advantage of companies to perpetuate these (somewhat true) myths as it keeps legacy customers from making that dreaded telephone call.

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The Cancellation Process
Having found the small scrap of paper on which I recorded my netZero account details for this very purpose several months ago, I decided that today was the time to finally make the telephone call to customer service to cancel my account. Here's a description of my experience and some advice if you need to cancel your service.

Cancellation instructions are provided by netZero at their site: http://help.netzero.net/support/faq/bp04.html. There is, of course, no online cancellation method and this seems to be the industry norm. The telephone number for the cancellation department is 1-800-851-7908. You are informed by the above web page that you will need to have your netZero member ID and the last four digits of your billing credit card number for verification. When I called, I was also asked for the telephone number associated with the account and my name. None of this information is particularly intrusive, but it would have been nice to know up front that the other details would be needed. I, for one, haven't used the telephone number listed in my account in five years!

When I called, I was greeted by a recording instructing me to press '1' if I was canceling due to technical difficulties. Unless you are canceling for this reason, don't press '1'. Continue to hold and you will be eventually greeted by an operator who will abruptly ask for your account information, one piece at a time. Writing this information down ahead of time will make it that much easier for you.. The total hold time was no more than two minutes, during which netZero played Miles Davis' Freedie Freeloader from his seminal album Kind of Blue. Even if the cancellation process were much more arduous, I would still give them points for such an excellent selection of muzak.

Once the operator has decided that I was, in fact, me, she politely read her script and asked how I could be assisted. I told her that I haven't used the service in a very long time- having had several high speed accounts in the interim- and would like to cancel. To the credit of netZero, I was never pressured into keeping the same account. When I canceled AOL many years ago, I remember their representatives trying to sell me on the benefits of the AOL service, despite my having informed them many times that I just wanted to cancel (I was eventually offered six months of free service). The operator informed me that she would process the order and put me on hold for a few seconds while this took place.

Now, however, this is where the ease of cancellation goes somewhat downhill. A solid half of the time of the telephone call was spent convincing the operator that I didn't want or need two additional products that were for sale. The first product is a back-up dial-up service- ostensibly to replace my DSL connection should it go down. It's a nice feature to have but pretty much every DSL ISP already offers this as a part of the basic DSL package. The second product is a combination of the usual security software tools- firewall, anti-virus, content blocker (so that my kids couldn't surf adult sites when I wasn't around, even though I don't have kids). I already have this software thanks to any number of free tools such as Avast and ZoneAlarm. The well-meaning operator, being told at least twice that I was protected by similar tools, spent a while fruitlessly trying to convince me the value of the auto-update features of these tools ("so that I wouldn't need to spend $60 or more when a new addition comes out"). Wow. She eventually informs me that should would send me a free CD with these software packages. Free is the mini-mantra here.

Only in mumbling, however, do I hear that the software is free for a month and then I would pay $4.95 / month unless I cancel. The back-up dial-up service is also free for a month, continuing thereafter for $4.95 / month. If I weren't paying close attention (say, for example, if I were at work, with a child, or just distracted) I could easily have put myself on the hook for two new products while canceling the first. The end result would be about the same amount of money being billed each month! What's even more aggravating is that I had to explicitly ask the operator not to send me these items. Without this explicit request, I would have been given them anyway ("I'm just going to go ahead and..."). So, then, I would have to call back in a month to cancel two services, not just one. What's even sneakier is the free-for-a-month clause. This means that my next credit card statement shouldn't show any netZero changes- leading one to believe that he has canceled. In the month after that, however, the billing would resume.

I'll update this article with details once my credit card's next two monthly billing cycles come and go so that I can check to see if I'm really canceled. For what it's worth: the operator with whom I spoke was polite and not sneaky herself; she was simply reading from the provided script.

Have you canceled netZero or any other ISPs? Write a comment and tell everyone how it went...