If they can charge for the fee, they should be by law mandated to tell me what it's for, and where it's going.
Sick of these TelCos getting billions in subsidies, not spending it on infrastructure as promised (somehow they are allowed to act as a for-profit corporation!?), lobbying to get more taxpayer money, and then whining when we find out that half the fees on the bills they send out are just to pad profits. Greedy bastards, the lot of them. Time to cut the crap and just regulate them as utilities.
They've been getting away for decades with labeling all sorts of their own costs as "taxes" and "fees" to customers. It's very misleading and IMHO should be illegal.
Exactly my thought. This problem wouldn’t have existed if the ISPs didn’t for decades advertise a plan for $50 and then charge $100 by adding on items like “just because we can fee” and “fee for processing your fee”.
this was my gripe with Sonic which people love over here in the Bay Area. their trucks and billboards advertise $40/month for gigabit speed (this was a while back when i had them). they then charge you $10/mo for a phone line which i never installed but it was part of the package and there was no way to avoid it. the phone line brings in additional fees like 911 and other local taxes + the taxes on internet service and my bill was more like $62/month. $22 more than their own advertised price.
I would have gladly paid $62/mo for gigabit speeds but i felt like i was overpaying them by $22 because of their ads.
Marketing were tasked with always increasing revenue, so they would often sit around with their feet on the table while they came up with such brilliant fees as "you downgraded your internet plan? Fee" & "You want more data on your cellphone plan? Fee."
It was sickening, but also very enlightening to realize it really was all made up.
Per the NCTA's Ex Parte filing with FCC: they are objecting only to pass-through fees applied by federal, state, and local authorities. They don't have any choice about any of these fees, which are really just taxes.
The choice they have (as is mentioned near the end of the article) is to pay them themselves (cost of running business) and include them in the advertised price (like it probably is anywhere in the world outside the US)
Fees should just be illegal for any service, across the board. Cost of internet should just be what it is, plus any actual sales tax. Price should just be the advertised price. Anyone that tacks on fees should just get immediately sued for the fees. Fuck 'em. Tired of the bullshit we put up with.
We have that system down here in New Zealand. However we have only two supermarket chains and a near monopoly for many consumer good and building supplies.
You can buy New Zealand produce around the world for less than it costs us in New Zealand. So going for a meal costs what it says on the menu and no more, but that cost is steep.
I don’t think inclusive pricing and the cost of goods are necessarily linked, there are many other reasons goods and services could be more expensive in NZ.
Oh there are, rules around employees, consumer guarantees act, acc levies and various other things. But it seems unlikely that have just 2 food suppliers isn’t a root cause of food price issues.
It looks like New Zealand charges a 15% VAT which is applied when New Zealand residents buy anything in Europe but not when New Zealand goods are exported, maybe that could be where the cost is?
There is VAT when you buy in the UK too though. New Zealanders pay way more. It's seems to be 50-100% what those in the UK pay for groceries, though this varies depending on how you measure or what you read.
Sure. But have you tried paying for electricity here?
In France, if you look at your EDF (national electricity company) invoice, you'll see that you pay VAT (a tax) on top of other taxes.
They also levy VAT on the "Greffier"'s fees. That's a clerk at the "commerce tribunal", which is basically a part of the state administration with which you interact whenever you need any administrative changes for a company. Say, you need to declare a change of address.
Sure, but in the case of electricity, it's no different from the other poster's “just because we can fee” and “fee for processing your fee”. All these are added on top of the advertised "contract fee" and actual electricity price.
They don't advertise prices such that you can take the advertised fixed fee, add your consumption times the advertised kWh price, and have your final amount due. No, they add a "tax on energy consumption", a "contribution to the public electricity service", and a "contribution to electricity delivery". And, on all of these, they levy the VAT.
> they would just recalculate the base fees accordingly
And I think this willingly done, to give the impression that taxes are lower than they really are. Which makes the whole thing seem dishonest.
incidentally the price of broadband is also much cheaper, you can get 1Gig in Dublin for 50 euros per month (about $54). For that price in LA I can get 50Mbps.
That's not really consistent across Ireland though, let alone Europe. I was paying €50 a month for two megabit DSL in Kilkenny five years ago as that was all my ISP's backhaul was good for.
Sure and it's not true of comparison across the USA either, lots of places you just straight up cannot get a phone line let alone broadband. It is comparable across two metro areas though, I think that comparison is fair.
When I lived in Cincinnati, people had to choose DSL or cable internet, from two (which cable provider depended on part of town). Cable was the only fast option, unless you lived very-very close to a telco "switching office". Cost per month was more than double same-speed cost in Columbus. Columbus had multiple providers in each area. $35/month.
In Cincinnati, the Cr^H^HTime-Warner Cable rate rose every month of every year for as long as you remained a customer. Complaining would get you a story about it being a "billing mistake" and "a credit on your next bill". The credit usually didn't arrive unless you complained again. And even then they might randomly switch tactics to "We're so sorry. We'll give you [1 | 3] months of [HBO | Showtime | Starz | all premium channels.".
I'm still wary of comparing charges across metros. /-:
I’m not sure I get your point. I was trying to make the point they telcos in the USA are super shit and expensive and they don’t even provide value for money after all that.
It’s one thing to have a monopoly and gouge your customers if the product you are providing is unimpeachable but they are far from that.
S'pose I was trying to reject the claim that prices should be comparable in different metros. I certainly wasn't saying that the dirth of competition in one place means the existing options were unimpeachable.
In Europe, it's still common to give a small tip. In Germany, it's called "trinkgeld" (literally "drink gold"). Usually, it's just rounding up to the nearest Euro or 5 Euros.
Japan is better: there's absolutely no tipping, at all. The price you see advertised is the price you pay, and they won't even take your tip. (There are a few exceptions: some American-style cafes have been putting tipping jars at the register; very annoying.) The only caveat is the tax: that's not always counted in the price, so many restaurants show two prices, the pre-tax price and the post-tax price just below it (usually in a smaller font).
The other thing that's MUCH better about Japan vs. Europe is that water is free. In Europe, if you want any drink with your meal at all, you have to ask for it, and if you ask for water, they'll bring a fancy glass bottle of very expensive bottled water. If you ask for tap water they'll give you dirty looks. In Japan, it's more like America: water (tap water, but it's really good) is free, and usually given without asking. Some places put a giant carafe of iced water on your table, which is great during this ridiculously hot summer.
The other thing that's much better about Japan (this isn't really about restaurants, though it does apply to the food court restaurants in malls) is that public bathrooms are free. In Europe, they usually expect you to leave a tip or some kind of fee for the cleaning people. Japan is again more like America: public bathrooms are just that: open to the public, for free. The big differences are that 1) there's a washlet on most toilets, and 2) they're actually clean.
> In Europe, it's still common to give a small tip.
No, it’s not. Europe is more than one country, and there are local differences. And even in several places where it is common, nobody is going to be upset if you don’t tip, because they have their salary regardless.
> The other thing that's MUCH better about Japan vs. Europe is that water is free. In Europe, if you want any drink with your meal at all, you have to ask for it, and if you ask for water, they'll bring a fancy glass bottle of very expensive bottled water.
Depends on the country, I assume, but in most of those I know they are happy to bring you some tap water. In France, they are required by law to offer tap water for free but IIRC that’s not the case in the Netherlands or Germany, for example. So generalisations are not helpful.
I was specifically thinking of France, and how you just have to ask for "une carafe d'eau", to get free water at restaurant.
In most parts of Italy, especially in the south, you usually get free water at the bar, if you are ordering something else, and even if you don't order anything (just ask it kindly).
> I assume, but in most of those I know they are happy to bring you some tap water
I find it very annoying that even have to ask. Especially when in many places they'd just bring you a €3-4 tiny glass bottle (which IMHO might be the most idiotic consumer product to ever exist) if you just asked for water.
You have to explicitly ask for tap, which is just awkward so way to often I just end up ordering a beer.. which is not ideal either.
To be fair that's also the case in New York, California and some other states (and minimum wage in these states is higher than in pretty much any European country).
Tap water is expected to be included for free in Sweden, and I would be slightly surprised if that didn't also apply to our neighbors (Norway, Denmark and Finland). Getting charged for water is just as big a cultural shock for us as it is for you.
I think that one of the reasons you have been downvoted is because you are generalizing too much about Europe. Neither the tip culture nor ordering water works the same across the continent, not even across all Western European countries. There are European countries where one does not even round up the bill unless one really wants to, and countries where it is totally commonplace to order a big pitcher of tap water.
Fair enough. But I was replying to a comment that also generalized all of Europe as having no tipping culture. It just isn't true. I've been presented with credit card slips asking for a tip in multiple EU countries, exactly like when I go to a restaurant in the US. This is something you will never find in Japan.
Sure, you can say that you aren't "required" to tip in these cases, or that they're taking advantage of tourists who don't know better, but still, they're asking for a tip. To me, "no tipping culture" means that tipping simply does not exist. Europe has a tipping culture; it's just different than the US's.
> I've been presented with credit card slips asking for a tip in multiple EU countries, exactly like when I go to a restaurant in the US.
I haven't seen it in this form in France (yet?). But I do see more and more payment terminals that are asking for a tip when they're presented to you. The amounts usually seem fixed, and you have the option of picking 0. I've mostly seen this in bars and similar situations.
Some stores may also ask you to "round up" to give to some charity. Fun fact: these didn't use to work with Apple Pay, so if you said yes, the assistant would have to cancel and restart the payment process.
yeah, public bathrooms have to be free. But as always it tends to come with an asterisk: for various reasons they may lock the doors and require a customer to ask for a key. IDK how legal it is but it's not uncommon to require purchasing food before using some public restrooms (not necessarily for fast food/grocery chains, but not unusual in either higher class dining or smaller mom and pop shops).
> Usually, it's just rounding up to the nearest Euro or 5 Euros.
It's not exactly common. In Belgium, the behavior is like when they thought it's really good or if people worked on a restaurant before.
But nobody expects that anyone would tip.
Last time I went to Hungary it was added to the bill though
Ps. A bottle of water is free in France and some other places.
Giving 50 cent for a restaurant when only using the bathroom is just a sign of good behavior in my view. Depends if I'm hurried, but I'll usually buy a glass of water. Then I'm a customer ;)
>Giving 50 cent for a restaurant when only using the bathroom is just a sign of good behavior in my view.
Why? If you're already eating there, why should you pay to use the toilet? And if you're not eating there, then why are you there to use the toilet? Just use a public one. If there aren't sufficient public toilets, that sounds like a failure of the municipal government. Any good city should have lots of public toilets outside, in train stations, or in large shared buildings.
Restaurants don't charge you when you're already there as a customer ( as mentioned in my last example)? They charge you when you need to go and use them as a public toilet sometimes ( eg. when it's urgent).
Again, why would you do this? Just go to one of the countless public toilets outside. How often are people trying to use the toilets in a restaurant without eating there? It seems insane they would even worry about this.
Also, my experience in Germany at a mall food court is that they DO charge you to use the toilet there, even though I was eating there.
> Just go to one of the countless public toilets outside.
If there even are public toilets, if they are open, if they are in a state to be used (and not just an uncleaned mess), if they are free... plenty of reasons to go to a restaurant to use their toilet.
Tell that to Germany and a bunch of other countries in Europe (then again having to pay to use a toilet still sounds a bit better than having no toilet to use at all..)
Europe is a broad brush. Tap water is free (by law) in the UK, and there are only two places I've ever paid for a public toilet: a handful of stations cost 20-50p and a handful of nightclubs might have a bouncer who you appear to be expected to tip £1 in exchange for a spritz of cologne.
I'm not sure I'd say either of those chargeable toilet scenarios is well correlated to clean toilets, but I assume mostly they do that to try to avoid various kinds of mischief.
In Germany, there is "case law" to that effect. Letting someone suffer of thirst is "unterlassene Hilfeleistung", roughly translated "neglecting to give aid". Not giving someone suffering of thirst any water is considered as an example in legal literature, however, I know of no real case where someone was convicted solely for that. And it isn't really straightforward to argue that a restaurant not serving tap water would fulfil the criteria of "unterlassene Hilfeleistung", at least because the usual restaurant-goer isn't suffering that badly.
Also, aforementioned aid doesn't have to be free, the person benefiting from your aid owes you the cost of that aid.
> Fees should just be illegal for any service, across the board.
Very much this. The law should be that you must advertise the price you will charge, full stop. Same goes with tipping mess. Just compute the total price internally and tell me what it is. Nothing additional allowed.
I agree, and somehow I am lucky enough to have 1G AT&T Fiber Internet for exactly $100/month with no other fees. At my previous home I had 500mb microwave/millimeter wave Internet and that was not taxed either. Seems like local/state/federal government hasn’t caught onto these mediums yet.
How is that better? You're asking for a world where the list price of Comcast Internet service is just quietly lower or higher depending on which suburb you live in. That's strictly worse than the current situation.
You should look at all these fees on your ISP bill and get pissed off. The issue here is that the taxing body's ploy worked: you got pissed at Comcast and AT&T instead of them.
It's better in exactly one way: you understand upfront what your internet is going to cost.
The same argument goes for including the sale tax or many gas taxes in the displayed price, (or displaying the price including VAT in EU).
FTR, I do get that by listing the tax explicitly you get to appreciate your local tax is lower than your neighbor's or get annoyed that it's higher (and then vote to change that).
My internet provider in Poland offered me the internet service for 60PLN/mo. Guess how much I'm paying for it? 60PLN/mo. They obviously pay many taxes and fees to different organizations but I don't need to care about it.
Regarding VAT in Europe and similar systems in Canada and Mexico where it’s included in the listed price: in all such countries which I’ve personally experienced, the receipts still generally include a breakdown of which tax applies to which item, including correctly distinguishing when different taxes or tax rates apply to different items, and often a total of each tax or all taxes per receipt. You do get to care about those if you want to merely by looking at the details on your receipt, or not if you don’t, but the sticker price is the final price either way.
(Tangent: the above is discussing consumer-targeted prices only. Business-targeted prices often don’t include VAT in the advertised price, even in the EU, because most EU business can get a credit for VAT paid on inputs to a product or service in which they themselves charge VAT. Of course, receipts and invoices still break down all the details of which VAT rate is charged for which item, and sometimes why.)
The situation for disclosure of multiple overlapping sales taxes in the US (as is usually the case in NYC for example) is much less detailed, sadly, but even there it’s still usually clear which items are taxed or tax-free.
I didn't know Canada/Mexico mandated showing the total price, I thought Canada at least was in the same boat as the US.
Very much a fan of the EU's Consumer Rights Directive, especially where it pertains to advertised prices. Even if some things have now skirted it, like sugar-tax and pfand in certain countries.
In my country at least, any business with a VAT number buys most things VAT-free and the end consumer is charged the whole amount, for the sake of doing less paperwork. Don't know how exactly it works when something is transformed into a lower-VAT output.
Good point. Despite having spent years living in Canada myself and acquiring a Canadian passport, I somehow fooled myself. Prices in Canada are usually advertised as before sales tax. Still, the rest of what I said was accurate - in places like Quebec where two overlapping sales taxes are usually applicable, the receipt does usually detail which taxes apply to which items and at what rates, which is what the ISPs seem to be objecting to for the various governmentally imposed taxes and fees they’re passing through to customers.
Mexico, like Europe, does include the VAT in prices advertised to consumers. That part of my comment was accurate.
As for Pfand (bottle deposit), that’s an interesting case. At least in Germany, they usually have to advertise the Pfand amount and list it individually on the receipt. But also, it’s similar to the situation businesses have with VAT: both for cultural reasons and due to the sums of money involved, it’s quite common for Germans to actually bother with returning bottles for the Pfand, so the extra cost effectively gets rebated for most purchases subject to Pfand. The whole system and the underlying psychological incentives would not work as well if the Pfand cost were more hidden than it is.
NCTA proposed informing customers of the maximum amount of pass-through fees/taxes from governments customers might face, to avoid the "sticker shock" problem with bills.
Having the individual fees listed feels important to me for two reasons: one, to allow customers who are so inclined to check for any calculation errors, as a safeguard against accidental or intentional overcharging by the ISP; and two, so that customers who want to lobby their elected officials to reduce or eliminate any of the charges can identify the specific charges applicable and each of their amounts, without which no meaningful political activism is possible.
> Having the individual fees listed feels important to me for two reasons: one, to allow customers who are so inclined to check for any calculation errors, as a safeguard against accidental or intentional overcharging by the ISP
Aren’t there stories in the news regularly about ISPs adding additional “fuck you” fees just because they can? So this does not seem to be working. At the end of the day, when I buy a beer I don’t care that €0.20 is going to their administrative overhead and €1.28 to their installations’ maintenance. That is not supposed to be the customer’s problem.
> and two, so that customers who want to lobby their elected officials to reduce or eliminate any of the charges can identify the specific charges applicable and each of their amounts, without which no meaningful political activism is possible.
This does not seem to be working well either. And at the same time, other countries without this issue seem to be doing fine with their broadband prices. It looks very ridiculous from the outside, in any case.
> Aren’t there stories in the news regularly about ISPs adding additional “fuck you” fees just because they can? So this does not seem to be working. At the end of the day, when I buy a beer I don’t care that €0.20 is going to their administrative overhead and €1.28 to their installations’ maintenance. That is not supposed to be the customer’s problem.
Yes they do sometimes add their own fees like you say. But those are usually clear flat amounts per line per month, so calculation of that is easy enough. It’s still worthwhile for customers to be able to catch accidental or intentional overcharges versus their published fee schedule, since that ability is part of what keeps companies relatively diligent and honest in this area. Widespread mistakes can and do lead to class action lawsuits or easy boilerplate individual arbitrations or government investigations, in the US.
Additionally, some customers qualify for exemptions or reductions for certain governmentally imposed fees. Transparency as to what is being charged is important to make it easy to notice whether this kind of exemption is or isn’t being applied.
Yes, why not, that seems reasonable. Your price is $60 plus up to $20 additional fees.
I think I got an offer like this from Sonic on the Bay Area. They would eat up all fees exceeding the declared maximum. (Or I'm making this up, was in 2018)
My small regional ISP doesn't charge the fees that Comcast charges my neighbors in my building, those are included in its list price because they're a cost of the ISP doing business.
You should look at all these fees on your ISP bill and get pissed off.
You're right, we should be pissed at Comcast and AT&T fraudulently misrepresenting the cost of service. They chose to pass these fees along (conveniently marked up for their "costs" associated with administering this fee to their customers) and are pretending that they don't have a choice.
The thing is, "service fees" aren't government-imposed. They're fees entirely made up by Comcast and AT&T for the privilege of providing the service that the customer is already paying them for. Since they're not optional, they can and should be rolled into the advertised price.
As we both read the NCTA filing, we're both aware that NCTA is objecting to pass-through fees from federal, state, and local authorities, not to service fees they themselves make up.
That's already the case. ISPs have the freedom to charge prices that vary by region and available service tiers.
Most consumers aren't going to care that a portion of the price is Comcast structuring prices so that it can cover mandated costs of doing business. I've never encountered a company listing, say, that it's charging additional pennies so that it can meet its Social Security tax obligations, for example. That level of granularity simply isn't that interesting for consumer-level prices.
If Comcast thinks these fees are unreasonable and wants to lobby voters and politicians to work against them, it is free to do so via other means.
> The FCC order said the requirement to list "all charges that providers impose at their discretion" is meant to help broadband users "understand which charges are part of the provider's rate structure, and which derive from government assessments or programs." These fees must have "simple, accurate, [and] easy-to-understand name[s]," the FCC order said.
The point is that the fees are charged to the ISPs, and then the ISPs want to pass it onto the consumer but not actually say that that's what is going on.
Yes, some localities will charge more things. Hell, listing them out would add pressure to make these fees go away! The FCC isn't the one imposing these fees. But ISPs are choosing to charge the users, but also not advertising these fees ahead of time! Advertising "this service costs X" but actually costing X + Y is something that feels pretty unambiguously bad.
Then again the US is the land of "every locality sets its own sales tax" so....
No, these fees are devised by governments to be passed on to consumers. Not that it especially matters --- it's also the case that taxes levied directly to ISPs are passed to consumers, because money is fungible. But here, it's especially overt that this is money governments are collecting these fees from their constituents; they're just using the ISPs as bill collectors.
I am assuming here that the ISP is who would get in trouble for not sending the money to the locality, not the N individual customers. I'm also assuming that if I sent my ISP money for the internet cost, minus the passthrough costs, the ISP would act as if I owe them money.
I get what you're saying about the fee being for the consumer. It's just like... OK then, well tell the consumer how much they are going to pay. You mentioned that the lobbying is to get rid of these locality's taxes, and I'm not pro-federalism so hey why not.
But all of these places have to collect the money anyways, so there is _a_ logic to how much to charge. Many places in the world, the price of internet is "type your zip code into a box and then we tell you". This seems eminently reasonable. This precludes a nationwide campaign to say exactly how much the service costs (unless ISPs just decided to eat the costs themselves!). But wouldn't it be good for people to know how much something costs?
Somehow T-Mobile figured that out. And charge me a nice round numbers that include all their fees and taxes. They are also able to advertise their prices nationwide.
The problem is that companies are deceptive in their adverts (and in the US this is apparently just normal and accepted). A company's ability to put out an advert that says "we're honest, our adverts don't lie to you" doesn't solve this problem for obvious reasons.
That there's still no magical way to know for free which companies are honest about their pricing and which aren't, in the absence of regulation. You can claim that you're just a happy customer and not a paid astroturfer, but it's not easy for me to practically confirm that (again, assuming there's no regulation to stop people falsely claiming those things).
Sure, but they are paying those fees in exchange for the incredibly valuable privilege of (usually) an exclusive monopoly on broadband in an entire city.
This was the contract they accepted when they eagerly signed such a deal, because the last thing those companies want is to have a bunch of little fiber outfits going around wiring up all the richest and easiest-to-deploy neighborhoods with quality fiber internet service. Or -- g-d forbid -- municipalities cutting them out and laying fiber themselves. Their franchise fee protects them from either of those horrors.
Pretending they're the victim for covering the costs they agreed to, and then acting like consumers are being unreasonable when we don't pay what was forced on us by our one choice of ISP is the boldest hypocrite move I've heard of yet from telcos.
Franchise agreements usually do not grant exclusivity to providers. And they're not the only fees we're talking about; counties, states, and the federal government apply pass-through taxes to ISP customers as well.
Go look yours up. I just did, to make sure (I have opinions on this weird issue because I'm on my town's governing commission for this stuff --- go join yours too, I've gotten to do all sorts of cool stuff that I wouldn't have predicted from the nerdy charter of the commission --- and after 18 months of falling asleep every time the topic of the franchise agreement came up, I finally stayed awake and learned we were making a fairly huge amount of money by soaking residents for their ISP connections).
Because property taxes are a predictable, fixed fee, and ISP fees are usage taxes applied per-customer.
Let's make this imaginary restaurant more fun: not only is it required to charge a per-seating fee, but it's not the same fee for each customer. Instead, they have to inquire about the residential address of each guest, and compute a locality-specific seating fee.
This imaginary restaurant could just pay all these fees itself as a cost of doing business and transparently charge a slightly higher whole number to the average customer.
Sorry, I thought you were implying that ISPs could opt instead to pay some lump sum to the various governments charging these fees, and not break them out per customer. They can't do that. Nor can they charge "$70 steak ($50 + taxes and fees)" --- that's what they want to do. It's the FCC that's saying the bill has to look the way you're complaining about.
Per the article, the FCC says ISPs are free to eat those costs behind the scenes and charge customers of the same plan the same flat rate (thus avoiding the need to itemize any taxes). The FCC is essentially creating an incentive structure that favors simplicity for consumers (possibly at the cost of making customers in low-tax areas pay a little more while those in high-tax areas pay a little less).
No, they can't --- the fees are different in neighboring municipalities. There isn't one single all-in rate they can charge everybody who walks in the door, which is the whole problem they're complaining about.
The ISPs are asking, explicitly, to be allowed to quote a "maximum possible" price inclusive all fees, non-itemized, like you suggest.
You keep repeating your objection as though you haven't read any of the replies. I really think what you're saying is not true.
> No, they can't --- the fees are different in neighboring municipalities.
So? Who cares? Why do I need to know this as a consumer? I'm sure a McDonald's in the city pays higher rents than one in the country, yet both will sell me a coke for $1 without ever making me think about that fact.
> There isn't one single all-in rate they can charge everybody who walks in the door, which is the whole problem they're complaining about.
If the current pricing for a 100mbps Internet plan is $40 + $1 (local tax) in one town and $40 + $3 (local tax) in the next town over, the ISP is welcome to just create one label for that plan at a $42 price point (with no enumerated taxes/fees shown at all) and abstract away the computation/remittance of those taxes internally. Call it $45 to really play it safe. Sucks for the people in the lower-tax town, but this solves the problem the ISPs are crying about.
This part of the article seems to suggest that charging a flat rate that includes the base price plus the maximum possible taxes and fees would be allowed: "'A provider that opts to combine all of its monthly discretionary fees with its base monthly price may do so and list that total price. In that case, the provider need not separately itemize those fees in the label,' the FCC order said." I wonder what the ISPs' objection to this is, maybe that it would overcomplicate accounting?
Isn't fee based on location of where the service is provided? My ISP at the rental property doesn't care about my residential address. They only care about the address where their service is consumed. You can stop worrying about that restaurant, they will charge same fee all their customers as long as they don't deliver.
This is not necessarily true for all businesses in all locals. For instance if you buy a car in CA, they charge sales tax based on your home address, so two people could in fact buy the same product at the same dealer and pay different prices
Are you saying that ISPs already have all this information and there is no problem for them to calculate these (checking the thread...) "unpredictable" fees?
I just pulled up an old comcast bill and it has: "Federal Cost Recovery Fee" and "Universal Service Fund Surcharge (State)" and "Utility User’s Tax /Business" and "Universal Connectivity Charge" and "911 Line Tax (State)"
In the UK, for most bills, it is line rental + provider fee. Line rental is to pay for the copper wiring that is still used for landline phones and all of the infra for it (via local loop unbundling). It goes to OpenReach and every ISP resells it unless they plant their own infra (Virgin, Hyperoptic)
They are not just taxes. Reimbursing the telco for their compliance costs makes about as much sense and reimbursing a restaurant for complying with local health code.
If they were actually taxes Comcast wouldn’t be fighting this rule, which does not apply to government mandated taxes.
I tracked down the FCC filing this article is about and read it. They are just taxes. There may be other things in the FCC rule that aren't about taxes, but the NCTA's objection is exclusively to the taxes.
Like most things, the government creates a problem then convinces everyone they aren't the reason.
I can't get broadband at my home despite being less than a mile from multiple providers in 3 different directions. I literally have an att fiber running down my row to a neighborhood less than a mile a way.
After being pissed at att for several years I finally looked into it and realized the county won't approve att putting in the service for anything but developer projects. Basically crony capitalism...
Most of these fees have nothing to do with exclusivity, and for the most part AT&T and Comcast don't get exclusivity in their franchise agreements. Go look yours up (your city or township should make it very simple to find, and if it doesn't, there's a reason for that!) and see if they got exclusivity.
I don't follow. In my specific case there has been one developer locked up already for collusion with the county so I think I'm fair in assuming the issue is not ATT in this case.
Plus what's stopping Comcast from coming down my street other than the countys rules about new developments only?
As a tax lawyer, I must rebut your ridiculous claim that "franchise fees are in fact taxes."
Franchise fees are fees paid by an ISP for the right to provide their service in a territory; paying the franchise fee entitles the ISP to access the public right of way (such as by installing lines under roads, in sewers, etc.). That they happen to commonly be calculated as a % of gross charges paid by ISP customers is irrelevant; royalties are calculated the same way and nobody calls a royalty a tax.
To put this as an example of why your logic doesn't work: it would mean that an utility bill is just a bill if paid to Comcast or Pacific Gas, but a tax if paid to a publicly-owned utility like LADWP for exactly the same services.
A bill isn't a tax just because it's a bill from the government.
So it’s a compulsory contribution to state revenue levied by the government and added to the cost of the service? Because that’s what a tax is…
> a compulsory contribution to state revenue, levied by the government on workers' income and business profits, or added to the cost of some goods, services, and transactions.
Sounds like it's not compulsory though? The ISP is perfectly welcome to lay their lines via private lands (having negotiated permission with each landowner, naturally) if they'd prefer.
> Sounds like it's not compulsory though? The ISP is perfectly welcome to lay their lines via private lands (having negotiated permission with each landowner, naturally) if they'd prefer.
Streets cut cities into small islands of private lands. Therefore, you cannot reach anyone without crossing the public right of way.
Perhaps mere crossing should be treated as de minimis. But when you're closing and digging up the public street for days at a time, or perhaps even running your lines through publicly-maintained conduits and accessing them through publicly-maintained manholes, you're taking a lot more from the commons than that.
Contrived arguments about whether something is a tax or a user fee has been a feature of politically motivated spin since basically forever. I would say any essential service (like access to internet, roads, healthcare, etc…) that requires for money to be paid to the government is taxes. There is no way to get access to the internet without paying these taxes to the government, and your suggestion to implement a private-land-only infrastructure is silly. There is no contiguous area of private land between my house and an ISP POP that doesn’t cross over publicly owned land. That’s almost certainly true for you too, and anybody else who’s reading this.
> I would say any essential service (like access to internet, roads, healthcare, etc…) that requires for money to be paid to the government is taxes. There is no way to get access to the internet without paying these taxes to the government, and your suggestion to implement a private-land-only infrastructure is silly. There is no contiguous area of private land between my house and an ISP POP that doesn’t cross over publicly owned land.
If it's both an essential service and effectively impossible to implement without making use of public land (and I don't disagree), then there's no reasonable basis for it to be a private industry operation at all. These ISPs can't have it both ways.
Most taxes and fees from an ISP or telco have absolutely nothing to do with passing over public property. Many telco fees are in portion or in full a profit for the provider!
It's not compulsory. It's a fee for access to public rights of way. If the ISP doesn't want to pay the fee, they are free to figure out a way to provide connectivity without access to the public right of way.
And on that note...my ISP (Starry) does exactly that. They don't use the public rights of way so they don't have to charge many of the franchise fees that Comcast et al do.
The ISPs allow you to add "free television" with your internet service, then it turns out to be very NOT free. They do get lots of ad revenue even though they "don't charge" for the TV.
This comment doesn’t make a lot of sense, and with all the quotes it’s hard to tell if you mean it’s actually free or not.
If they are not charging you for the TV service then why are you complaining about ads? Complain about paying for ads, not getting an ad supported service for free.
If I understand what you're saying correctly, I think the Junk Fee Prevention Act, which Joe Biden championed in this last SOTU address, is being marketed as doing this, more or less.
Banning them from lobbying would also be a welcome change. How can a utility with a monopoly on services be allowed to buy favorable laws in government?
"Quid-pro-quo bribery isn't the issue. The corrupt politicians who accept bribes are the issue."
This isn't how we do legal policy. We wouldn't say "all bribery laws are gone, we'll just make sure that we don't have any politicians that accept bribes some other way."
They're not corrupt because of lobbying, they are already corrupt and take advantage of lobbying.
There are things that could be done but the people in office making the laws are not interested, and the population is too apathetic/indoctrinated to make the correct choices.
Yes you can, even if you don’t want to restrict lobbying on free speech ground you can place donation caps and increase transparency requirements which would both limit the power of corporate lobbying
You can end donations entirely, and disqualify candidates who accept them. The government can put up a website where you can get information about candidates, send everyone bundles of information, schedule debates in a standard format with clear rules for participation, and throw events where candidates can give speeches, and distribute those speeches to everybody who wants them. You can give everybody a day off to vote.
The reason government is corrupt is because we want it to be corrupt. If it weren't corrupt, nobody would pick this endless shower of dynastic creeps.
There is no good democratic outcome for $175K a year jobs that cost half a billion dollars to apply for.
> The reason government is corrupt is because we want it to be corrupt.
The reason government is corrupt is because it is corrupt, and corrupt governments don't give their citizens an option for "stop being corrupt" in the ballot.
> There is no good democratic outcome for $175K a year jobs that cost half a billion dollars to apply for.
I would argue that this is a reason to reform our electoral system rather than just resign ourselves to a corrupt system. If it didn’t cost half a billion dollars to become a politician and the pay better reflected the job responsibilities (along with other reforms) we’d probably see less corruption
Donation caps and transparency aren’t bans. Our system is based on representatives acting on behalf of constituents. When a constituent contacts their representative that’s lobbying. Lobbying is the system. So you can’t ban it.
The issue is that lobbying has two different meanings. The literal meaning is trying to influence politicians but the common usage refers to when companies and special interest groups spend hundreds of millions of dollars on donations and advertising to get politicians to pass laws that benefit them. The first meaning, which is what you’re talking about, is fine. But the second meaning, which is what people mean when they talk about banning lobbying, is the opposite of democracy.
Yes, I've seen this firsthand. In some cases, you can buy a Federal Senator's vote for as little as $10k. Using this number on a larger scale, corporations can buy the entire senate for as little as $1 million. The ROI potential on a $1 million investment that nets you complete legislative control in your desired area is just insane.
Granted, these deals are often backended and include a job promise down the road or some similar under-the-table stuff (jobs for relatives, etc), but I'm continually shocked by how cheap our legislators are. You'd think if a legislator knows a corporation is poised to make several billion dollars if a piece of legislation is passed, the legislator should demand a lot higher than $10k.
Why? What is the benefit to the public good of allowing corporations to use their massive resources to shape legislation to benefit them at the expense of the general public?
Generally industries are much better than random politicians at predicting the consequences of rules. Obviously it isn’t good if the rules being made are entirely in the interests of incumbents, but it’s also bad if the rules don’t make sense or ignore the realities of some industry or technology. Even ignoring lobbying, you see regulators reaching out for comments from industry about new rules.
Though perhaps lobbying (as practiced or in general) should still be considered inappropriate.
> Generally industries are much better than random politicians at predicting the consequences of rules
This is true but when people are talking about restricting lobbying the kind of lobbying they want to restrict isn’t companies saying “hey this policy isn’t good for us”. It’s companies spending millions of dollars on donations and advertising to force politicians to make laws that benefit them. It’s possible to restrict the second kind without impacting the first kind, for example by implementing spending limits.
The article linked at the top of this thread is the former thing. But maybe that’s not relevant.
Aren’t the rules on donations made by companies pretty restricted in the US? Isn’t it normally that companies persuade their employees to give to some company pac (as a deduction from their paycheck) and that pac then makes maximum campaign contributions to various politicians. (The limits on both contributions to the pac and to campaigns are pretty small. On the order of $5k. It seems unlikely to matter much to a politician but maybe they do care).
Maybe you’re not talking about the US or maybe I’m wrong or there is some other mechanism I don’t understand
> It’s companies spending millions of dollars on donations and advertising to force politicians to make laws that benefit them
They aren't forcing. They'd just rather take the money than not. If politicians weren't corrupt, we'd only have the first kind of lobbying, as no one will spend money on something that doesn't work.
Industries are also better with regard to conflict of interest in that there is no conflict, they just have interests which are entirely separate from those of the public.
> Even ignoring lobbying, you see regulators reaching out for comments from industry about new rules.
Yet somehow the only times those "comments from industry" are taken into consideration in a meaningful way is when they come from large businesses with deep pockets or astroturf consumer interest groups funded by large businesses with deep pockets. Genuine grassroots consumer interest groups rarely leave a mark.
Because individuals have a Constitutional right to petition their representatives and that right doesn't magically disappear when they decide to do it as a group of individuals?
People should be able to say what they want. They shouldn't be able to pay politicians for favorable treatment. If that's somehow required for free speech, we should get rid of free speech.
I think the problem here is that people don't know what lobbying means.
It doesn't mean paying politicians.
Lobbying is simply that - petitioning your representative for change (or no change). No money changes hands, you literally just get time with your representative to argue your case.
When a company spends $1M on lobbying, it's $1M given to a lobbying firm to put together a strategy and a pitch to representatives.
If you want fund raising laws to change, then say that.
I think the problem here is that people don't know what lobbying means.
I think many people are aware of what lobbying means. They're just using standard motte-and-bailey tactics to make it seem like they're defending something innocuous (petitioning the government) while they're really defending bribery and corruption.
> it's $1M given to a lobbying firm to put together a strategy and a pitch to representatives
The Strategy: Hey $senator, wouldn't you like $500,000 donated to your re-election campaign? Of course, we would need to know that you share our commitment to Clean Coal!
(I assume the lobbyists themselves get to pocket their share of the $1M, but don't know what the markup is on bribes)
Not a poli sci expert so forgive if this is naïve, but if I were forced to make the policy my first proposal would be:
• Entities which receive more than half their funding from any non-human "persons" (corporations, other legal entities) or where more than 50% of the funding comes from the top 500 donors, or who have fewer than 10,000 unique donors (in the past 4 years) overall, cannot provide any funds to any candidate's campaign, nor run ads mentioning, hinting, or suggesting any candidate or party, nor any other BS shenanigans astroturfing PACs legally do today.
• The rest of the entities who don't fall under the above, still cannot make contributions, but can run ads, assuming the ad starts and ends with the phrase "(TRUE LEGAL NAME OF ORG) [supports/opposes] (name of politician, bill, or ballot measure)"
Politicians taking meetings and listening to ideas based on who is paying for their (re-)election campaigns is corruption. They don't represent corporations, they represent all of the people in their state or district. When they take a meeting from a campaign donor, they are saying that only wealthy people's voices matter to them. It's corruption. Legal and yet still morally depraved.
From the article you linked: "There are therefore two kinds of legal entities: human and non-human. In law, a human person is called a natural person (sometimes also a physical person), and a non-human person is called a juridical person"
No where in that article does it cite a jurisdiction where a non-human legal entity has the same rights and responsibilities as a human. My point still stands that a human has a different, albeit overlapping, set of rights and responsibilities in comparison to other legal entities.
If the people running the monopoly want to lobby the government on their own time, uncompensated, that certainly sounds fine. It's lobbying on behalf of the monopoly that is an issue.
From the NCTA's Ex Parte filing: they're objecting to reporting requirements for pass-through fees from federal, state, and local governments. Importantly, none of these are fees ISPs "can" charge; they're taxes that public bodies collect through the ISP's billing system. In some cases, those "fees" are added by statutory mandate; in others, they're a condition of access to municipal last-mile infrastructure (as is the case with franchise fees).
I generally think most middle-class people aren't taxed enough (yell at me somewhere else about this). But these taxes are frustrating. They're hidden on ISP bills, so you can't easily tell that they represent your local municipality milking you for fee revenue. And they're not even consistent; for instance, because Comcast runs copper television service, they've got a different history with many municipalities and different contract stipulations. In other words: your local government can tax you specifically for using (or not using) Comcast. That's messed up.
It should be the responsibility of public bodies that levy fees to make sure that people are made aware of the nature of those fees. The ISPs aren't responsible for this stuff, and shouldn't be asked to do more work to further conceal decisions our elected officials are making for us.
Importantly, none of these are fees ISPs "can" charge; they're taxes that public bodies collect through the ISP's billing system.
This is false. The ex parte filing itself clearly states that these passed-thru fees are not taxes and that part of the burden ISPs are trying to avoid is having to break out these fees the way they already are required to break out taxes.
The truly bizarre thing is that the ISPs already have the breakdown of these fees available to them when they create the bill. They're actually doing more work to obfuscate this information by summing those amounts together.
The ISPs aren't responsible for this stuff, and shouldn't be asked to do more work to further conceal decisions our elected officials are making for us.
But that's exactly what ISPs are trying to do. If you truly understood what you appear to be arguing for (accountability for elected officials), you should be in favor of requiring ISPs to break out these fees separately...because then customers would be able to see exactly what fees are making their bills so large.
The only reason ISPs don't want to do this is because they impose their own, wholly-made up "service fees" and include this in the fee amount they "pass along" to the customers. If they had to break out fees separately, it would be immediately apparent that government-imposed fees are a substantially smaller portion of the bill than ISPs (and their sycophants) claim.
This is money that is, by design, collected from customers of the ISPs through the ISPs (that's why they're called "pass-through fees"). When you read your local municipal budget, you'll see a line item for the revenue collected from these fees, which, again, are levied by local governments against their residents. Each dollar in that line item literally offsets a dollar of property tax levy. I'm sure there's some technical reason why I'm not allowed in court to call these "taxes", which is why I'm glad I'm a citizen involved in local government and not a tax lawyer, because that means I don't have to care about this distinction: they are taxes.
I'm sure there's some technical reason why I'm not allowed in court to call these "taxes"
I understand that your conservative ideology prevents you from understanding that governments can impose charges on businesses that are not taxes. But on that note, welcome to the world of capitalism. Governments are market participants too now. And as previously stated, these franchise fees are charged to ISPs in exchange for them getting the right to utilize public rights of way. It's not a tax because it's a business transaction: money in exchange for access. ISPs are free not to pay these franchise fee, and in exchange for not paying the free jurisdictions are free to deny them access to the public rights of way.
Each dollar in that line item literally offsets a dollar of property tax levy
This is false. In 99.99999% of American municipal budgets, property tax levies are separate from fees levied on businesses. They are independent pools of revenue that don't offset each other. Perhaps you live in the rare business-hostile jurisdiction where business fees offset property tax revenue? (On the tax front, red states are actually phenomenally hostile to businesses; what they don't charge in income taxes they more than make up for through a variety of other taxes and fees on businesses. My employer, for example, pays almost as much to Alabama for "other business taxes" as we do to California or NY, where we have several times the revenue and actual physical nexus, for income and business taxes collectively.)
you'll see a line item for the revenue collected from these fees,
Yes, of course fees are characterized as revenue. It's basic accounting. What else would they be characterized as? Funny Money?
Here's a newsflash: the service fees on your internet bill are also revenue to Comcast, both the pass-thru fees and the additional made-up service fees that Comcast adds to pad the bills. And again, those made-up fees are the reason that Comcast and AT&T are opposing this mandate, because it would reveal that the "service fee" charge on your ISP bill is mostly a made-up service fee imposed by your ISP and not imposed by your local government.
I don't have to care about this distinction
People who proudly proclaim their ignorance are the ones least suited for being involved in local government, especially when those distinctions are fundamental to an issue they're arguing about.
If the fees they charge are due to specific levies the government places, and those fees depend on where the customer is located, why is it that much work to demote that in bills, considering they are already calculating who to charge what fee where? If my Internet bill had a bunch of line items that said "local city tax" or some such I can't really be mad at that can I?
Sure every government body could make their own website listing telecom fees and then I'd have to go to at least 3 (local, state, federal) to figure out how much I'd be paying or the ISP could tell me since they already aggregate that info.
It is listed in bills. The objection NCTA has is the FCC's requirement that the fees be catalogued to consumers at the point of sale, before a bill has been incurred. I don't blame them for objecting to this. These aren't Comcast's fees; they're municipal taxes.
> I don't blame them for objecting to this. These aren't Comcast's fees; they're municipal taxes.
I do. If they are obligated to collect it, they ought to be obligated to inform the customer at the time of purchase. It's unreasonable to expect customers to agree to vague terms that leave them not knowing how much they are going to pay.
If I go shopping online, I know how much I'm going to pay in shipping and sales tax before I agree to the charge. This doesn't seem that different to me. The ISP knows how much they are going to charge. They just don't want to tell their customers until it's too late. I'll blame 'em for it all day long, it's their fault they don't want to tell me up front, not my government's.
I'd actually go further and say that taxes should always be included in prices, even before checkout.
A common anti-poor talking point is that poor people don't make and stick to budgets, but corporate refusal to include tax in prices means that you can't reasonably tell how a given purchase will affect your budget beforehand. A simple trip to the grocery store means that you have to know what taxes apply to every item in your cart before you go to checkout to be able to know how much you're spending. That's not reasonable for the average consumer. If you really think it is, go ahead and try calculating your total of 20+ different grocery store items before you check out--you'll fail.
How can you consent to a contract if you don't know what the contract actually entails? I realize a lot of places in the US don't even spell out sales tax on items before they're rung up at the cashier but this level of intransparency seems like it contradicts the entire premise of legal contract theory.
If an ISP collects these fees and taxes, it's their obligation to inform the customer about them and to include them in price listings, at least in addition to the raw price. For example in Germany b2b price listings will often exclude VAT (which means VAT will still be shown but not included in the listed item price) but for b2c prices will always match exactly what you pay. The only example I've ever seen of a "surprise tax" in my entire life both in private and professionally is artists' social security insurance contributions, which are owed by any business or organisation paying a contractor or employee defined as an "artist or editor" (which includes most creative and media work): the fee is not collected by the person you pay but has to be paid to the social security organization directly and it's something you're simply expected to know if you run a business or organization.
Paying another organisation in exchange for use of their infrastructure isn't a tax, and doesn't become one just because that organisation happens to be a governmental body. Should these ISPs be able to "pass through" their upstream transit costs as a fee on top of their advertised prices too? Or maybe their peering fees with government-operated ISPs but not with privately owned ISPs?
Surely the infrastructure owner can offer whatever pricing structure they like. Per-seat fees aren't exactly rare in private industry contracts either.
You're one of the few people here I've generally respected and you're better than this. You're just repeating the ISPs' rhetoric here without thinking about it critically.
Consider: what incentive do ISPs have to hide municipal taxes? Why would they do that? Wouldn't it behoove them to advertise these taxes to consumers so that consumers know it's not them adding this cost? There's obviously going to be very little cost simply reporting these taxes given they already have to calculate them to pay them.
The obvious answer is that, maybe this happens occasionally, but the majority of these fees aren't what you're describing: this is just a foil that ISPs are using to cover up their own greed.
> It should be the responsibility of public bodies that levy fees to make sure that people are made aware of the nature of those fees. The ISPs aren't responsible for this stuff, and shouldn't be asked to do more work to further conceal decisions our elected officials are making for us.
How does this make sense, given that ISPs are lobbying to be allowed to continue concealing these supposed decisions?
That's funny because when renting in Germany your landlord does pass on various fees and taxes like this but they still have to give you an itemized bill spelling out every single fee and tax individually and for shared utilities they have to spell out the before and after readings of the meter so you can double-check with the previous bill.
Likewise on every price increase my German electricity provider gives me a listing of each fee and tax that goes into the price. This is routinely used to point out "hey, we're not being greedy, most of this actually goes to your government so maybe deregulating us would save you money, wink-wink, nudge-nudge". If e.g. Comcast thinks its taxation is particularly punishing and anti-competitive, increasing transparency about this would actually help make their argument for them. That they still prefer to be intransparent and pretend this is unreasonably difficult when they literally have to do all the same accounting internally anyway suggests the intransparency is giving them an advantage.
> It should be the responsibility of public bodies that levy fees to make sure that people are made aware of the nature of those fees. The ISPs aren't responsible for this stuff, and shouldn't be asked to do more work to further conceal decisions our elected officials are making for us.
What are your thoughts on businesses incorporating and listing the amount of sales tax paid on receipts of transactions at your local grocery/convenience store?
It appears to me that the least surprising place for these things to be listed is where it is most relevant, which is alongside the primary transaction presented as an invoice or receipt. How would you improve on this UX assuming that the fee is definitely going to be incorporated into the cost?
> I generally think most middle-class people aren't taxed enough (yell at me somewhere else about this)
I'll refrain from yelling. Can you expound on this since you thought to mention it?
There were rumors Amazon was entering the space. It would be awesome for incumbents to be disrupted and for the system to move towards actual competition.
I wish Google was able to achieve this with their GrandCentral acquisition, but as usual they Google let their acquisition wither away.
Kind of like Google Fi in the mobile service provider space, anyone, even if someone as otherwise bad as Google or Amazon, can potentially disrupt things and improve prices and functionality.
I know this is close to whataboutism so I will try to choose my words carefully, but does Amazon really have that much power over the Internet? Realistically Amazon does not have a large advert network, footing in mobile, operating systems or web browsers?
They have some control in the form of AWS/Route 53 but that's a far cry from some larger DNS, domain registrar and CDN providers.
Not denying that they have a lot of money, but even when using that money to try and buy a user base (Alexa or Fire Tablet/TV) their success has been pretty limited overall.
When you control the most common way to buy and sell goods personal goods in the western world, you control a lot more than the internet. You control everything else.
Perhaps, but you'll have to admit those numbers are far from insignificant and on top of that represent things that are rather more impactful than mere personal blogs such as even critical Dutch government services.
Somehow it's _really_hard_ to list all the fees ahead of time, yet it's still _really_easy_ to list them all when it comes time to bill their millions of subscribers each and every month. The largest of these companies manage to compute this number more than a billion times a year.
Any regulator who takes this line of reasoning seriously is immediately suspect.
There's nothing quite as American as not knowing what you're going to pay until the moment you have to pay it. It happens in retail, hotels, especially healthcare, car shopping, everything. We have this weird culture of just accepting terrible status-quo. This is one of the many nationwide problems that we have convinced ourselves there's no way to fix, despite many other countries in the world having fixed it a long time ago.
No country has fixed this a long time ago. This problem never existed in the first place. In some countries not having a clear fee schedule will get you in troubles that you don't want with your clientele.
>Section 20 of the Consumer Protection Act 1987 makes it a criminal offence for a person in the course of his business to give consumers a misleading price indication...
Another person in a different thread[1] mentioned his city where businesses are tacking "living wage surcharges" onto their bills! So now the customer is paying your payroll?
I'm convinced this is the inevitable end-state of American business: Advertise $0 for all products, and then opaquely "pass through" everything as fees when the customer goes to check out.
I’ve been to a running sushi restaurant where you pay for your time at the table, and if your stomach is large enough and if you don’t waste your time, the food gets ridiculously cheap.
The US can't even get companies to include sales tax on price tags shown in physical stores. If they don't even manage to do something that basic properly, don't hold your breath trying to get them to fix telco/ISP pricing.
I have mixed feelings about this one since it can help reminding people how much of their purchasing power is being extracted from the state. That being said, it could be fixed by having the two prices at the same time.
In Germany all listed prices everywhere (except in strict b2b spaces) include VAT. On invoices and bills prices are usually listed as both "raw", VAT and combined, often per item. The only exception is deposit on packaging (cans, bottles and bottle crates) where the deposit is always listed separately on price tags and listed as a separate item on the bill. But these deposits are standardized by law and can be refunded at any place that sells these goods.
This doesn't seem to have any particular effect (tho Germans are notoriously uninterested in political activism) except that any person on the street can likely tell you exactly what the VAT rate is (it's currently 19% on most goods, 7% on some specific items and 0% on a much smaller set of items -- most people likely won't know specifically which items are in those two categories tho as it's somewhat arbitrary thanks to lobbying).
Shops generally don't break out what exactly goes into the "raw" price tho as that's usually not in the brand's best interest (because it spells out their profit margin, which may be surprisingly high).
If it must be included in the price, business will go out of the way to demonstrate the part of the price a tax is responsible for. Pretty much everywhere where it’s the case, somewhere on the page with price there is a note explaining that tax is included.
It's the same ISPs that make it very easy to sign up for service on the website, just enter your name, address, billing details, and they ship you a modem. But when it's time to cancel... (with the exception of certain states) it must be difficult for them to build a 'Cancel service' button into the website; you are required to call a phone number, wait on hold, and begrudgingly speak to customer retention agent.
A while ago I was helping a friend pick a cell phone plan with T-Mobile USA. If you study their plans, the "Essentials" plan does not include "taxes and fees", but their "Magenta" plan does. When contacting T-Mobile, they could not tell me what the fees were even after providing the specific ZIP code. They said I would have to sign up for the plan first, and could then see the fees on the bill. Even when I told them that the choice of plan would depend on the amount of taxes and fees, they were not able to tell me and said that I could look at the current cell phone bill with the current carrier, and that the taxes and fees should be similar.
It is crazy they can't tell you how much you'll be paying before signing up.
> It is crazy they can't tell you how much you'll be paying before signing up.
Even further along the dystopic spectrum: Imagine if it worked like health care insurance. Even monthly bills would be only guesses subject to arbitrary revision.
I've tried to pay a healthcare bill for an operation and a followup that had been completed months prior, and they still would not tell me how much I owed. I just got sporadic bills in the mail and there was a single website where I could enter how much I wanted to pay them in total. I waited a couple months, walked to the hospital, and asked them for the sum. They told me they had no way to know. I paid what I thought I owed and then I guess somebody figured it out without telling me, so I ended up in collections for a two figure sum.
It's because insurance companies tell hospitals how much they'll pay for things but when you ask how much they actually cost, the hospital shrugs because no one is breaking down the prices. The various specialists may be independent of the hospital in terms of billing which only complicates things as you now have more than one bill (and they may be out of network for your insurance). The non-profit hospitals will usually work with people without insurance to figure how much they can afford to pay and just charge that. The actual costs are likely much more but no one really knows since insurance is likely overpaying to compensate the hospital's losses on caring for the poor.
It wasn't just future bills though. I waited months. I had received a bunch of bills, from them, on paper, and apparently missed some. I knew I probably missed some. Why not just tell me, in person or online, what the sum of the bills they've sent me so far is? They're calculating it at some point.
It was a decade ago, and I'm still salty about it lol. I think the hospital has a functional website now, because it's in their interest to get all of the money from customers instead of a much smaller percent from a debt collector anyway.
Regardless, I think if an organization can't tell people what they owe, it clearly doesn't need that money and should forfeit it.
My favorite example in this space is college tuition/room/board. This seems to be the only example of a service in which you have to share all your financial details with the vendor and then they will tell you how much it is going to cost.
Many types of loans you can take out, where approval and interest are dependent on your credit history and assets, and also your tax burden to the government, are kind of like that too. Really anything where the amount charged varies with your ability to pay.
"It was recently discovered that your procedure involved a duck, however the insurance company will only cover geese, so here is the revised bill... Er, an invoice, not the animal's."
Verizon has a tool online to estimate your fees for a given zip code. It’s hilariously broken - like it will return a list of the same city and county taxes listed dozens of times. It’s completely unusable. But as other posters have noted, it somehow doesn’t stop them from calculating and charging those fees every month.
At the very least the support agent didn't try to run a calculation, and cause a phantom bill you'd never know about until you get a call from collections or discover a lien on your house.
I recently signed up for a business TMobile tablet plan. I had the option to choose taxes/fees as included or extra. The plans are identical. I have no clue why that's even an option, but I'm glad I get to pay a nice round number.
That exists because somewhere out there in the world is a category of businesses have to deal with the cost and taxes separately for legal or tax reasons. I've run into it before and it's incredibly annoying when all you have is a single line item on the bill. It's even more fun when you add currency conversions on top.
My reasoning here is this: it should not be legal to provide pricing when the customer already owes and has no choice to go elsewhere. That price should be zero.
Capitalism is playing with supply and demand. Holding people hostage is not it.
Example: I went to Hawai this month with my wife and the fires broke out. So I went to United’s website to move up my return flight. They said in order to have the option to change the flight free of charge I needed to upgrade from Economy Basic to Economy for $90 ($45/person). After I did, the site said there were no flights, however I could see the flights on kayak. So I call United, and indeed, they had a flight, but it would cost $1000 ($500/person). The return flight cost more than the entire 2 way flight as originally booked. Plus the $90 upgrade for no fee changes.
It's both, relative to the US. The US is uniquely horrible in this because it has no real consumer protection mechanisms. Instead a lot of US business practices are the result of litigation rather than policy.
It may be expected in the US but it seems ridiculous in Germany because we have a consumer protection agency and it has teeth. On the other hand, suing a company for damages won't get you nearly as much money here. But of course most of your medical expenses would be covered by public health insurance and you normally don't have to worry about something being "out of network" or requiring a copay etc.
used to work in a company that build and implemented BSS/OSS system for major telcos (including the one that you mentioned).
I can totally see that high level pricing for a packages is modeled globally and exposed to sales team while taxes are implemented only in billing system, because its "zip code" specific.
> ISPs object to a portion of the FCC order that says, "providers must list all recurring monthly fees" including "all charges that providers impose at their discretion, i.e., charges not mandated by a government." The five trade groups complain that this would require ISPs "to display the pass-through of fees imposed by federal, state, or local government agencies on the consumer broadband label."
OK, so their problem is solely with pass-through 1:1 fees from local governments, and the ISPs totally agree that there's no problem showing their own fees that aren't one-to-one pass-through amounts, right?... Riiiight?
> Comcast said the non-mandatory fees also include pass-through of state and local government fees.
Sounds like they're choosing to mix fees [are / aren't] their fault together, and then whining that it's "unfair" to make them list any of them.
My favorite thing is when Telcos say they cannot tell you how much their plan will cost when you sign the contract, but magically, they are able to figure it out when you get your first bill.
Yeah, I recently switched service and prepaid a full year. Not just fewer surprises, but often cheaper.
I still live in a kind of dismayed disbelief at how much money the major cell-phone carriers want for plans they consider normal/budget. This seems to be because they include what is (to me) a crazy amount of cellular data, amounts I'll never use because I don't stream full-length movies on the bus or whatever.
For context, a major local network's "essentials" plan costs $60/month for 50GB of "premium" mobile data and unlimited not-so-premium data. In contrast, a reseller's prepaid plan (on the same infrastructure) comes out to $15/month for 5GB (5G speeds) and a 4gb trickle (LTE) after that.
Since I'm always near Wi-Fi and almost never exceed 2GB/month, it's a no-brainer.
Meanwhile here in Italy rechargeable sims have 10 euros per month plans with unlimited data (which is actually ~1TB but it's not advertised since it's more of a fair use thing) or very high caps (150-200GB)
The biggest issue with being on an MVNO is that your data priority is below all other customers. It’s not even that bad most of the time, but if you go to a congested area like a concert you’ll definitely feel the speed decrease.
It's because the people who make the website aren't the people who manage the billing which a labyrinthine black box of custom hand-rolled rules. That poor customer service rep has no idea.
>> It's because the people who make the website aren't the people who manage the billing which a labyrinthine black box of custom hand-rolled rules. That poor customer service rep has no idea.
The customer service rep isnt supposed to have an idea. Neither is the mailman delivering your telco bill, nor the guy stuffing your telco bill into an envelope -- that is a strawman argument.
>> "billing which a labyrinthine black box of custom hand-rolled rules"
yep, and as I mentioned, the labyrinth magically becomes available to the company during billing, but is somehow "unavailable" a month before when you're signing a binding 2yr agreement. Lets all be honest - it is intentional, because telcos dont want to show customers the prices they are about to pay, they just want to show customers the 3mo promo price w/o tax, w/o regulatory recovery fees, etc.
With usage based they can tell you it will be "base cost + cost/unit", but some carriers will tell you they can't determine the taxes/fees you'll be subject to until you're billed.
It likely wouldn't hold up in court very well, but also you'd have to be able afford that
The US desperately needs to institute the EU rule that all advertised prices are inclusive of all taxes and fees.
It’s not just sales tax (which admittedly varies by city) but you also see absurd things like ‘SF health mandate’ on a receipt at a restaurant. What are they going to break out next, rent?
In Seattle when they increased minimum wage to $15, this airport parking company called MasterPark started adding a "living wage surcharge" to their bill [1]. Employee wages are a "surcharge" that's added on to the bill!! I don't think anything can top this.
Even if the prices aren't great depending on the provider, at least in EU countries the price you see is what you pay. My internet bill is not €30 + hidden fees + taxes + executive coffee fund, it's just €30. You may be charged additionally in specific circumstances like ending a contract early without cause, but in the general case you aren't charged on top of what you see, so I don't know what you mean by "in every country [...] predatory practices and billing ensue" because it's not necessarily the case.
When I lived in Germany, in annual utilities bill there was an "internet cable fee" of EUR 100. Every year, from every apartment in the building. When I tried to push back they basically said "it's a cable fee don't fucking argue with us". In another apartment there was no "internet cable fee" but the fastest internet available was 16Mb DSL, so fuck them as well.
I guess that fee likely comes from the fact that the owners of the apartments voted to install cable internet hookups to the building and pay over time since it's a large fee and everyone can benefit from it. It's often the case in an apartment that a shared service, such as a new elevator, is paid for collectively, even if you don't use it, so it's not surprising that you did have to pay. I wouldn't lump it in with the specific discussion here because it's not about "hidden fees" since it's tangential, as the internet company wasn't charging you a fee through some backhanded method. If you moved in after the connections were added you should have seen this when you got the initial contract as well, so it shouldn't have been a surprise.
We are talking about annual collective fee in thousands of EUR for the entire building. For the fucking coaxial cable setup, at that time over ten fucking years old. Did they have to reinvent the fucking coaxial cable during the process? Were the cable guides owned by some alpha predatory rent seeker?! I'm really curious what kind of corrupted opaque deal it was because all I got in response was "THIS IS CABLE FEE PAY IT!!!".
In France we have one operator (SFR Red) that's known for being shit and messing with billing and having predatory practices, but the other three major operators are generally fine and you typically pay exactly what was advertised.
The only hosts you can talk to with that speed are other 25gbps customers, with custom hardware, and an ultra fast NAS or sending random bits.
I have 10gbps, also for nerd cred. 1/10/25gbps from this provider is all the same monthly cost, differing setup fees.
The advantage to 10gbps is I have a silent router (Mikrotik RB5009), and every 1gbps port is entirely independent. You will never have 1 machines activities slow another's.
Do I ever actually get 1gbps speeds? Yes, sometimes, for large downloads on XBOX. BitTorrent doesn't achieve this because your peers don't have that upload. Google drive doesn't achieve that because their VMs are probably shared 1gbps each.
But, Init7 has excellent peering vs other 1gbps fiber providers and no traffic shaping at all.
It depends on the locality. The city, county, and state may all impose taxes. In particular, cities sometimes opt to generate revenue by taxing specific services, such as cable TV. So a resident in City X pays $5 per month extra for cable TV, while someone in City Y pays $7.44 extra. Both of these cities allow just a single cable operator, and require that operator to collect the tax and remit it to them. But if you have satellite TV then you don’t pay the tax. And maybe City Y never updated the law to apply the tax to cable internet service, but City X did. So someone living in City X pays $5 per month if they have both cable TV and internet service (or either one alone), while someone in City Y only pays the tax if they have TV service. If all they have is internet service, then they pay nothing extra.
And if the service includes telephone service, then there will be a Federal Universal Service Fee, which pays for reduced–cost land–line telephone service for the poor. It’s like $0.11 per month per telephone line, IIRC.
The average customer might see two or three of these things on their bill. But it’s not uncommon to see a dozen either.
So it definitely depends on where the subscriber wants the service, and what service or services they subscribe to. None of this is really all that difficult to figure out, and these companies have already automated it. They are just complaining because they will have to raise their advertised prices, which naturally will lead to reduced sales. Currently they just lie through their teeth about their prices, and count on people being too lazy to cancel their service once they see the first month’s bill.
Interesting, for context in Australia almost all goods and services that aren’t billed based on usage must clearly outline total cost - if you order something you can expect the marked price to match the reciept (unless the receipt is less, common in retail discount offers)
We also don’t have tipping culture, you can tip, but it’s not an expectation. Though, the latter is slowly creeping in.
Yes, I understand that. In fact I would like to see us move in that direction. I think these new rules are definitely a step in the right direction.
However, put yourself in the position of someone selling internet service in the whole country of Australia. If you put out a television ad that will be seen by everybody, then you either cannot quote a price because every viewer could end up paying different taxes, or you must quote a price but put a footnote that mentions local taxes, or some other dodge. The new rules actually cover this case as well. In any situation where they show a generic price not including local taxes or other fees, the ISP must instead direct the consumer to a source that gives them a correct customized price (presumably a web page). They must also document the event, which is something else the ISPs are objecting to. I don’t know enough about it to say if that would be a good thing or not.
It’s the same with sales taxes too, btw. Every town and county has their own sales taxes, so advertised prices never include them. At least in that case each store will only ever need to charge a small number of tax rates so in principle it would be easy enough for the stores to print price tags that show how much tax would be collected for each item. Still, it was historically easier to leave the tax information off of the price tags and rely on the customer to simply remember the local sales tax rate (usually between 2% and 10%, except on tax–exempt products) so that’s what we still do.
On the other hand, gas prices always include the taxes. Historically gas taxes have had a much higher percentage rate (because they are taxed a fixed number of cents per gallon, rather than as a percentage of the price), so maybe gas stations just didn’t want customers to argue with the clerks.
Also Australian, when I went to the US and ordered a burger at McDonalds for $2 - I was so confused when they asked for more money after I handed them $2. Turns out they don't include taxes in the advertised price for some reason.
That's how Comcast works here in western Washington.
If you have non-internet service from them (such as TV, phone, or home security) there are plenty of fees on your bill which makes it more than the advertised price of your package, but if you just have internet the bill matches the advertised price.
> if you just have internet the bill matches the advertised price.
Until your fixed-rate introductory period ends. After that, watch the price creep up month by month. I've even seen very low-speed service become more pricey than high-speed service (possibly because it's no longer being advertised, so the rate doesn't have to look good).
Source: experience with a non-Comcast cable provider.
If you are on a contract then when the contract ends your fixed rate will jump from the contract fixed rate to the advertised fixed rate for month to month service.
If you are not on a contract internet is fixed rate at the advertised plan rate.
For example if I go to their site and pretend do be someone moving to my area and look at their plans for my neighborhood my current plan without a 2 year contract is $73/month, or $63/month if you go paperless and use use autopay. That's the same price I am paying as a long time customer on that plan.
With a 2 year contract it is $45/month or $35/month if you go paperless and use autopay for years 1 and 2, and then goes to up to the prices from the previous paragraph.
It really is that simple. Plan price, minus $10/month for paperless and autopay, minus promotional discount if on a contract.
When you add TV or voice then you get things that won't necessarily be fixed rate. There's a broadcast TV fee and if you TV package includes sports channels a regional sports fee. If you have voice then there are state fees. There are also state taxes on TV and voice.
Yup, I've seen this myself. My introductory plan at 69.99/mo (or 79 I can't recall) was good for the first 6 months or maybe a year, and then it steadily crept up in $10 increments every quarter or so for the next 4 years I had their service.
To be fair, the plan also went from 200 megs to 1 gig over that timeframe in similar incremental increases, so that was kinda nice.
Ziply Fiber is the same way. $70 exactly every month, 1 page bill. Trivially easy to understand. Symmetrical gigabit, no data caps. No ipv6 though which sucks.
Left Comcast/Xfinity the moment I had a better alternative. I still get door to door Xfinity folks trying to sell me more expensive, shittier service.
As someone who has dealt with crazy tax codes and different regulatory fees in telecoms I can tell you that the systems that calculate those bills are very old and clunky. They are built to handle billing in batches, and are not suitable to provide accurate amounts to be shown on the consumer facing website on demand.
Of course they can build something that is suitable. But they are a combination of [lazy, greedy, corrupt, under-resourced].
Working at an ISP I've never understood all these fees/random charges, and this "fear my ISP is watching what I'm doing"
Then I realise it's a US thing.
In NZ we don't log/care what DNS sites you hit. You're better off to use our DNS because it's faster/closer to you than 1.1.1.1/8.8.8.8.
We don't charge any fees, short of the $90 a month for unlimited Gigabit Ethernet speeds fibre.
I feel so bad for you all. As a tech behemoth you bring amazing technology to the lives of everyone on the planet (well, within reason). But it seems your personal lives have to suffer as a result, it's so screwed up.
I hope all and any stupid additional "fees" are shot down. The "Service costs you $X a month" should be all you see, it's up the ISP to account for all their outgoings before setting that price.
Edit: To be clear, the ISP I work for. I don't think any of the others do either, but I obviously can't vouch for what they do/don't do. I know the Mobile Carriers here aggregate and sell locations data from the cell towers.
> and this "fear my ISP is watching what I'm doing" Then I realise it's a US thing
I'm not sure about it being a US thing. But I don't personally have a privacy fear with my ISP because I can't really do anything about it. At some point a clear request has to hit the edge of my ISP and at that point, no matter what I do, they will know what I'm doing. It's better to mitigate the deep packet inspection part of it rather than worry about DNS requests leaking (that's what coffee shops are for).
The real problem I have with it is I pay $280/mo. for a "gigabit" line from Cox. It has a data cap. On top of having a data cap if I don't use my own DNS Cox will inject ads and other data into my requests. There are several blog posts on this happening and I am not on my computer with screenshots. It suffices to say that they, and other ISPs in the US (at least), regularly poison requests with advertisements, warnings, alerts, and other non-sense. During COVID, despite paying for a top tier plan, my connection was throttled to 10 Mbps 5/7 days a week because so many people were watching Netflix. It doesn't even matter if you pay more they'll QoS your ass into the ground at a whim. Billions of dollars and they can't even spend the time to install better hardware.
The combination of last-mile control and a resulting veritable monopoly on internet in most localities means ISPs can more or less do what they want. Sucks. I try not to blame the employees but they, too, are complicit in this nonsense. ISPs are a legitimate cancer.
For reasons I cannot fathom, most outages in US ISP's are due to their DNS servers going down.
The reason ISP's log all your traffic is so they can sell that data to data brokers.
The sale of a data set is not a one-time thing. You can sell it over and over again. Different brokers or end customers or even government agencies (yes the government is buying that data, reported here even) or you can sell time slices of that data or demographic slices of that data.
I could not tell you how profitable that data sales is. It is a closely guarded secret. This could mean it is very high or very low, either sparking much outrage.
But for sure, ISP's in the US are spying on their users for profit.
Why the US and not (say) NZ? Lots of money, and lots of people. I would trust an ISP in Vanuatu not to spy on me.
Are you suggesting the CEO configures the core upstream routers / BNGs without telling me? This is certainly a shock.
Regardless - I was talking about us as an ISP collecting/selling that data - not the data we must provide to government agencies to fulfil our legal obligations.
Hear me out: Privatize all ISPs and run them USPS style (gov owned, non-gov board operated). Not just email but the internet is more vital than USPS, there is a reason it was never made fully private. New ISPs should still be allowed like fedex and ups are with usps.
You pay thus bill but you also pay them again with your tax money with the hefty rural service subsidies they basically rob from the government.
Municipal internet is thinking too small, federal internet is more like it. Last mile should be 100% gov owned with CPE/NID/inside-wiring installed by the gov or competing ISPs but owned by the consumer.
The fed gov should just buy out their majority share stock and do a hostile takeover and buy the rest of the shares once price tanks when people here it will be operated at a loss.
No more outsourced support,etc... because fedgov can't do that. And my favorite benefit: they can't sell your info to third parties and then have the gov buy it from them once they are operated by the fed.
Something similar is already the case with other infrastructure in many countries.
For example, in my country the company providing my electricity connection is (by law) separated from the one which sells me the actual electricity. This means I can choose one of a dozen or so companies who do the whole electricity market thing to sell me power at the best price possible, and being charged a fixed fee for the hookup regardless of which company is selling the power to me. The same thing applies to gas and (to a very limited extent) telephone/internet. The companies owning the infrastructure are usually owned by the local governments, so they do not really have an incentive to generate a profit.
The same applies to railways. One state-owned company manages the rails itself, and everyone who wants to run trains on it pays them a usage fee. It's the only solution to deal with natural monopolies like this, really.
This is basically the exact model Australia did with their NBN which was a disaster. The idea was to nationalise the last mile networks and unify them into one wholesale ISP that retail providers could use. It also intended to upgrade the network rapidly to FTTH.
Problem was just as it was getting started there was a change of govt and the FTTH element was significantly reduced in scope to save costs.
So now you are left with the govt owning all the last mile infrastructure with basically no competition and an extremely slow plan to upgrade it. I believe FTTH upgrades are increasing in pace now, but it's hard for me to find stats on actual FTTH rollout there (they combine it with gigabit HFC which isn't the same imo).
This is really the downfall of many people who think the state should nationalise telecoms. Yes it may work well with a government that's really commited to it. But you also run the risk of an election with someone that doesnt consider it a priority suddenly you are in a real mess.
Was their telecom government operated? Why would the government decide budget if they don't operate the company but merely own it like a shareholder would?
To your point and my USPS analogy, the head of USPS trump appointed is still at the same job because Biden can't just fire him.
I've worked for an ISP. The only fees that are arguably reasonable are taxes imposed on the company so you can say we offer $n across many markets + local/state/federal taxes as applicable.
These taxes are a tiny minority of such fees which exist solely to open with we offer service for a small n which is a crappy undesirable level of service whereas actually charging as much as 2n for small levels of n.
Instead of disclosing them just make all extra fees for consumer facing service illegal and force a singular ala carte cost where the total cost is the sum of entries like buying cans of beans at the grocery store.
It's a known field that needs no creativity in its pricing model.
In my country, everything seems to be too hard for ISPs. Imho governments should impose some SLAs and force them to disclose their hidden fees. I honestly believe ISPs and their leaders are not just evil but stupid enough that they cannot improve on their own.
I'm with the ISPs on this, at least partway. Some of the fees ISPs charge aren't really fees at all, but rather pass-through taxes, set by ordinance and mandated into ISP bills through local franchise agreements. These aren't ISP fees at all; the ISPs don't control them, don't benefit from them, and presumably would rather they not exist at all.
Annoyingly, the point of sale for Internet connections isn't necessarily the municipality where installation happens, meaning that to give a complete record of these fees, ISPs need infrastructure to look them up by address. It's not the world's hardest IT problem, but it's a cost imposed on them by external actors, and those costs all get passed to consumers.
Yet they can put them on the bill each month, no problem? This is a specious line of reasoning, that it's too hard to list the fees, but easy to charge for them. Same lookup, written on the same damn bill. Not an extra cost.
It's a fundamental rule of fiscal responsibility to account for every penny in the bill.
Normally when a business has costs, they recoup them by charging an amount for their services that can pay their costs and leave them some margin. ISP around the US advertise one price and then tack on these... apparently special costs as separate line items. There's no good reason they should be allow to exclude them from the advertised price.
Somewhat related: Comcast recently called to try to trick me into moving from month to month to a 2 year contract with a $200+ cancellation fee for a piddly amount of savings monthly. If I wasn't reading the details I'd have fallen for it. They also still haven't replaced the faulty coax line at my current location that they said they would get to "soon", (before the pandemic,) after half a dozen phone calls and several tech visits. Their level of service is abysmally poor in any area without competition. They make a ton of money. It's an inexcusably bad situation. I feel very limited in where I can buy property because of the widespread local monopolies held by shit companies like Comcast.
> They're taxes that local governments are charging their residents, using Comcast as a bill collector.
Uh huh. But that's effectively the same as just charging the ISP per subscriber, the difference is all perception and inconvenience to the subscriber. Why don't we get line items for the property tax that businesses pay on every bill?
Variable pricing is a HUGE industry in the US (and elsewhere). It's true for fees like this, and it's even more true for variable rate mortgages. Whoever owns your mortgage can add arbitrary fees to your mortgage at any time, and whats more, is they not only don't have to tell you but the companies that manage the mortgage data consider the code and data proprietary.
I personally believe there is a huge, recurring fraud going on that eclipses what e.g. Wells Fargo has been doing to its customers.
The ISP (or any other business) should be required by law to list precisely the amount and conditions for all fees that the customer must pay, recurring and non-recurring. Any potential customer must have the opportunity to get this information from them (and doing so should not require an internet connection, since otherwise it is a conflict of interest if the fee is for the internet connection).
Even fees that are mandated by the government should be required to be listed, although the ISP need not say that they are mandated by the government (if they have the same conditions as other fees they charge, the amount can simply be combined with it). If a customer wants to know about the government mandates, they should request such information from the government or from public libraries (and again, internet connection should not be required, since it would be a conflict of interest if the fees are related to internet access).
If they charge a fee which is not listed, then the customer should not be required to pay that fee. The ISP might (at most) cancel the service (although it is unsure if it should be permitted, due to net neutrality), but they cannot sue you or debt collection etc, if it is their own fault.
We'll stop getting junk fees when (1) people stop checking out carts with higher prices than advertised or (2) total prices are required by law, like in Australia.
If only I could pay “up to” $65 per month. I downgraded from a gigabit plan because it was performing at 600-750 Mbps and only when using the ISP’s own speed test. The upload wasn’t any faster than the 500/50 plan. On real world tests like downloading Linux ISOs or downloading a 100GB game off Steam or Epic it was only 200-350 Mbps. What’s the point of a speed tier that only works on-net?
When I moved back to India from the US, I was pleasantly surprised how cheap and fast the internet here is (which should have been the characteristic of a developed nation like USA). I currently have a 300 Mbps home broadband, TV, Unlimited calling cellphone with 1.5 GB mobile data everyday, and an unlimited calling landline phone all in one plan in less than 21 USD a month.
There is really a problem in the US, here in a big city a lot of stores, restaurants and service companies just keep adding fees so it become impossible to get the real price of stuff. And some restaurants not only add fees but the servers preclick on 20% tip for counter service. This is really getting out of hand.
I think this story is not very interesting. In particular:
- Some new regulations were proposed. The regulator asks for comments. The industry says they don’t like the regulations. That is the general story here and so I think it is mostly not interesting.
- The headline thing does sound hard. If you can’t see why it might be hard to figure out from your software and policies (built up through decades of mergers) exactly what all the fees are, I think you basically have a lack of imagination. Plenty of online stores even struggle to show you how much sales tax you’ll be charged. It is right for industry to state that this is hard but that it is hard needn’t mean that the regulations shouldn’t apply. Sometimes new rules are harder to implement than regulators expected and their deadlines get pushed back, but I think that’s basically still normal. I don’t think there is anything interesting here
- Some other comments made were that consumers would find the list of fees confusing. That does sound confusing. (It would be even worse if they had to read out such a schedule over the phone) I personally think it wouldn’t be a particularly good outcome of the regulations for consumers to see some long list of potential extra fees below the sticker price – they don’t know the true price before and they don’t know the true price afterwards. I was not entirely convinced by the argument that this is like sales tax. I didn’t look at the alternative proposals, but plausibly some could be better. For example you could require a maximum price inclusive of fees and taxes be conspicuously advertised and require that fees may not total above this advertised maximum. It seems to me that the right rule would require companies to publish some number representing their cost where decreasing that number (a) gets them more business on the margin and (b) leads to less surprise bills to customers. The max-bill number could be decreased by knowing better what fees would be charged or by actually reducing the cost of services and I think both of those are things the regulator wants
I used to work on big telco billing systems. All possible charges, discounts etc are configured in the billing system (otherwise you wouldn't be able to bill for them!). Doesn't take a genius to work out how easy it would be to list them...
As a European looking over the pond, lobbying and this sort of crap have gone too far in the States. I don't know why you all put up with it.
This is just how regulation in the US works. Agencies propose rules and affected companies and individuals voice any concerns when the rule is opened up for public comment. If they didn't voice concerns, we'd have a pretty terrible world where rules are handed down by fiat blindly.
I still don't understand how it can be legal to charge more than the price written in the contract...
Feeling like... if i ever moved to the US... i'd have to declare bankruptcy in a month because I'll spend triple what I think I'm spending due to the "fees".
This is not an ISP problem, this is a consumer problem. A simple all industry regulation can fix it. Requiring all advertised prices to always include all taxes, surcharges and mandatory fees. All ambiguity to be interpreted in consumer’s favor. All the cancellation and signups fees, or other additional requirements to get the advertised price must be spelled out in the same font, size or speech speed right next to the price. This is it.
actually, i don't care that much about a list of all the fees. they just need to include them in the listed price. in some countries it's even required by law to do it that way.
This is obviously a lie, the provide the fee in the invoice to the customer and probably have to identify the fees for taxation purposes with tax authorities at tax time.
Comcast, Spectrum, AT&T, etc should not exist. They are rent-seekers.
The people in the US who have the best Internet access are those where the service is provided by municipal broadband (eg [1]). You will never fix these big national ISPs because they exist solely to maximize shareholder profit while providing the least service possible at the highest price they can get away with while lobbying to change laws to benefit them and lock in their monopolies (eg to make municipal broadband illegal).
As an aside, these national ISPs exemplify capitalism. Municipal broadband, by definition, follows socialistic principles (where the municipality and, by extension, its residents own the means of production).
AT&T made it compulsory to use their gateways by installing certs for Auth on their hardware and just saying they do not offer for sale the same hardware and third party hardware could not (would not?) Be issued those certs.
I tried my luck buying a gateway off ebay and trying to get out of the rental fee. Their position was that this was "theft" as they did not sell these devices. Granted, I had to file an FCC complaint to even get that response. The exec I spoke with basically threatened me with legal action if I did not drop it.
Shady. They deserve to be replaced by muni or Federal internet indeed.
While I don't agree with the shady practice of charging hidden rental fees, I can really understand why they want to provide their own CPEs. That way they can control them a lot better via remote management and ensure they work well with the (very much shared) network.
Do people expect to be able to use their own ONTs on FTTH? Clearly not because it would cause a load of issues if you had one bad terminal on it taking the entire GPON segment down. So I don't really understand why providing your own cable modem is any different.
> Do people expect to be able to use their own ONTs on FTTH?
Yes? Someone could also take down a GPON segment by shining a laser pointer into it, so that's not really a good argument for banning it. The ONT is often just an off-the-shelf box, and there is no technical reason why it has to be ISP-provided - especially when they then try to charge a fee for it. If some enthusiast wants to just stick an SPF module into their homelab Cisco router, why try to ban it?
There are a few countries where the ISP is legally required to allow third-party ONTs on their network, and that's not really causing any issues in practice. Those laws were originally introduced to deal with really crappy ISP-provided modem+router combos which lacked basic features, but they still work just fine in the FTTH era.
here in California apparently there are only two companies that actually supply internet backbone to residential customers - perhaps those are AT&T and Comcast? Every other residential Internet service provider in California are resellers of those services.
Why is this? there is what is said and then what is done .. as others have mentioned, no company securing those regulated monopoly positions would ever voluntarily give that up. It is very likely that those providers also play-well with whatever domestic surveillance is on tap since Clinton. Adding the word "socialistic" is simply corking the bottle, it would easily be mocked in public media while the backrooms play out.
Ok I'll be the odd person out and say this is actually sort of reasonable. I only know this because I've worked on large batch billing systems before. (Yes on a mainframe too. Gen-Z check your iWatch for a pulse).
In the US, nearly any given city, un-incorporated area, county, region, state, can assess a tax for services. These things are like fleas. They're hard to track down and full compliance is nearly impossible, and the if-ands-butts when they apply and when they come-go is an added challenge, especially if they apply like to persons visiting the area.
I'm guessing whats happening is most counties are like "our population is X" and you can estimate the tax billed owed on that, and that's good enough for government work. Customizing a billing system to individualize and print the $0.04 is an enormous expense for literally no benefit to the consumer.
Again, just a guess.
Now ISPs, many of them being entrenched monopolies, obviously hide behind their finances to rip consumers off. I'm not advocating for that. The real problem is a lot of these municipalities _invited_ the Comcasts of the world in at steep discounts, and now are crying that there is no competition (Because nobody else can compete profitably). That is another issue, but I don't think printing an extra $0.04 on your bill is going to make a lick of difference.
That doesn't change the fact that they somehow manage to figure out the fees at billing time. If they need my street address in order to determine the eventual fees, that's fine. But for them to say that it just can't be done is to piss on me and tell me that it's raining.
The rule at issue is about "discretionary" fees -- not ones imposed by a government.
What's happening in many cases is states or localities are requiring the telco to comply with some law (e.g. to have functional 911) and the telcos get away with misleading customers into thinking their cost of doing business is your government tax.
Capitalism is predicated upon consumers being able to make a rational purchasing decision. If true costs are hidden, there is no way for someone to assess the product before them. Maybe the fees are an irrelevant $.04 today, but that could turn into a hidden $6.99 tomorrow
Sick of these TelCos getting billions in subsidies, not spending it on infrastructure as promised (somehow they are allowed to act as a for-profit corporation!?), lobbying to get more taxpayer money, and then whining when we find out that half the fees on the bills they send out are just to pad profits. Greedy bastards, the lot of them. Time to cut the crap and just regulate them as utilities.