Outside The Box

What’s worse than finding a worm in your apple?

My dad delighted in posing this riddle to us when we were kids. The answer? Finding half a worm.

That was the feeling I got last week as I searched for the best price on a bottle of Ballistol. If you don’t know what Ballistol is, you probably have a can of WD‑40 sitting where the Ballistol should be.

It’s not cheap, but one of the advantages of knowing how to wield AI is that AI is adept at comparison shopping. It saves hours, and you don’t have to endure “ranked” search results or scroll through pages of sponsored ads to find what you’re actually looking for.

My AI assistant is very reliable at this sort of thing. I’ve named her Thelma Lou. But this time, I just couldn’t find the same price she was seeing on the big‑box store’s website.

Thelma Lou told me that was probably because the Clayton Walmart was shipping to me in Arkansas. Arkansas? She thought I lived in Arkansas. Walmart.com thought I lived in Arkansas. I love Arkansas, but I live in Georgia.

And here’s where we come to the worm in the apple. Because my “old technology” internet provider — Windstream — plays fast and loose with IP geolocation, handing out IP addresses that are misread by e‑commerce sites, I was being quietly charged a premium. Here’s how that works.

When you start shopping on an e‑commerce site, there’s a good chance an algorithm instantly adjusts pricing based on where it thinks you’re shopping from. Home Depot and others adjust pricing based on your ZIP code, but they also use IP‑based regional pricing. The goal is not to help the consumer. The goal is to determine the maximum price the consumer will pay.

Out here in the wilds, rural ISPs often take the easy road and register whole blocks of IP addresses under one big umbrella location. It saves them money, spares them from babysitting thousands of individual records, and works well enough most of the time. The problem is that the rest of the internet treats those records as gospel. So when your provider tags an entire region to a hub in Arkansas — whether out of convenience, cost‑cutting, or the limits of a system built for copper instead of fiber — every online merchant and streaming service takes that as your “true” location. That’s how you end up routed to the wrong warehouse, dropped into the wrong DMA or “Designated Market Area,” or charged taxes meant for somebody two states over. A tiny shortcut in the network map becomes a quiet little tax on your wallet.

To add to the bill, rural areas in particular get to pay higher prices because of the hostage factor. If you shop at Ingles, you know that better than anyone. Apply that same “price discovery” to e‑commerce backed by sophisticated algorithms that not only penalize you because of your location, but adjust your price based on data it has collected about you. Do you live in a more affluent area? Do you live in a captive area? Did you leave items in your cart while you checked prices on another website? Amazon changes prices in real time millions of times a day in order to maximize both volume and profit margin.

And this isn’t just about shopping. It affects what you can watch.

Streaming services like PBS and Hulu rely on DMA boundaries to determine what “local” content you’re allowed to see. They enforce those boundaries using your IP address. So if Windstream hands you an IP block that’s mis‑registered, PBS may decide you’re in the wrong DMA and refuse to show you your local station. You can enter your ZIP code all day long — it won’t matter. The app trusts the IP address, not the mailbox at the end of your driveway. Tracey missed part of one of her favorite shows on PBS last year because the app insisted we lived in North Carolina.

So you’ve Googled Amazon, Walmart and Home Depot and think you’ve found the best price. You notice all the prices are pretty close to each other, and you’re accustomed to that, but sometimes an item will be on sale somewhere. You’re unaware that there’s a good chance you’re paying a premium because Windstream is telling the Walmart site that you live in somewhere you don’t. The worm in the apple is half eaten.

But when you click on shipping, you leave the virtual world of electrons and IP addresses because the truck driver needs an actual address to deliver. That works most of the time, except for a woman I know whose medications were actually shipped to — you guessed it — Arkansas.

And that brings me back to my dad’s riddle.

Finding a worm in your apple is bad enough. But finding half a worm — realizing the other half is already eaten— is worse. I’ll never know how much extra I’ve paid in the zone where corporate optimism and good intentions haven’t quite caught up with reality. Windstream says it intends to modernize its entire network, and North Georgia Network has fiberoptic, but though I can see where NGN’s fiber ends from my house, they won’t bring it that last quarter mile (and they don’t return my calls).

Windstream, at least, always returns my calls, and though “Steve” in Mumbai is a little hard to understand, the guys who roll out in the Windstream trucks are the best. If you live beyond that “last mile” of broadband, you understand. Out here, we only see the part of the problem that lands on our doorstep: the wrong prices, the wrong shipping, the wrong local station. The other half of the worm is buried deeper, in the infrastructure we depend on and the algorithms that quietly decide what we pay.

And unless we shine a light on it, we’ll keep taking bites without ever knowing what we’ve swallowed — paying a tax we never knew about.