I want to applaud the founders of this Christian cell network, and I will, just as soon as someone explains to me what they have actually built. They call it a phone network. A network, for those keeping score, is a system that carries signals from one place to another without asking what the signal thinks about Leviticus. This one does ask. This one has opinions. At that point you have not built a network — you have built a very expensive opinion that occasionally lets you check the weather.
The selling point is that pornography is blocked at the network level and the block cannot be turned off by the subscriber. Cannot be turned off. That is the feature. You are paying a monthly fee for a service that cannot fully serve you, from a provider that has decided in advance which of your choices were mistakes. Most businesses call that a warranty. This one calls it Christianity.
Now, I have nothing against blocking things. I have blocked relatives, creditors, and at least one newsletter that described itself as “a conversation.” But I did the blocking. That is the customary arrangement between a person and a telephone: I pay, I decide, I occasionally regret. The new arrangement is: they take the money, they decide, and the regret is apparently already baked in at the infrastructure layer.
Experts note this is the first U.S. cell plan to use network-level content filtering that subscribers cannot override. First in the country. A genuine innovation. I tip my hat, which is more than the network will tip toward your browsing autonomy. The founders have looked at the entire architecture of American telecommunications — a system built on the premise that a carrier moves data and stays out of the moral philosophy business — and said: what if we did the opposite of that, and charged people for it?
The phone still makes calls. It still sends texts. It connects you to the broader digital world, with certain exits boarded up in advance for your protection by someone who will not be in the room when you need them. That is not a telephone network. That is a chaperone with a cell tower. The service plan is two years. So is a lot of purgatory.