ISPs complain that listing every fee is too hard, urge FCC to scrap new rule
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
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.
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.
It was very weird going to a restaurant for the first time and paying the price listed on the menu, and not 30% more (sales tax + tip)
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.
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.
https://switcher.ie/broadband/ireland/dublin/?eircode=&tv_in...
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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 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....
This literally sounds like fraud to me. If I did that, i think i would get charged
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.
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).
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.
Can you please explain what you meant by this?
If they were actually taxes Comcast wouldn’t be fighting this rule, which does not apply to government mandated taxes.
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...
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.
Yes, I’d call it a sales tax, property tax, income tax, etc. based on what it was grounded in.
A bill isn't a tax just because it's a bill from the government.
> 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.
Streets cut cities into small islands of private lands. Therefore, you cannot reach anyone without crossing 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.
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.
Except no additional cost sidestepped the monthly surcharges and taxes that ended up on the bill anyway.
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."
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.
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 it is corrupt, and corrupt governments don't give their citizens an option for "stop being corrupt" in the ballot.
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
Politicians hate electoral reform.
PACs were limited lobbying.
That wasn't good enough...so we got super PACs with virtually no oversight what-so-ever.
In most cases, a vote that ends regulatory bodies and enables businesses to dump toxic sludge in your drinking water costs a couple grand.
It’s actually embarrassing how cheap votes are.
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.
Though perhaps lobbying (as practiced or in general) should still be considered inappropriate.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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)
I mean, EFF uses fundraising to lobby the government for privacy protection. Should we ban that?
• 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.
Corporations have always been legal persons, going back to the Middle Ages (guilds, chartered cities, universities) and even Ancient Rome:
Opinions and precedents vary:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person#Rights_and_respon...
Who else besides people would control a monopoly?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
I wish Google was able to achieve this with their GrandCentral acquisition, but as usual they Google let their acquisition wither away.
I agree disruption in the space would be great, but don't let Amazon enter the ISP space. They have enough money, and power over the internet, as is.
I would have to think that would be an antitrust violation anyway.
Any new entrant can only increase competition and drive down prices.
Amazon as an ISP would be amazing for me. There's only one ISP that serves my neighborhood already, so any additional one would be a godsend.
If it's between no new ISP and a new Amazon ISP, I'll take Amazon any day of the week.
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.
Any regulator who takes this line of reasoning seriously is immediately suspect.
>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...
may have helped
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.
maybe a "free food" restaurant with upcharges for calories? more for protein calories? expensive diet plans?
Suffice to say it didn’t help my BMI at all.
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).
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.
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.
"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."
That's about the level of dystopia I'd expect.
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.
Either the $90 or the $1000 should be illegal.
seems unreasonable for a consumer facing product, how did it come to that?
Crazy? 2023? I would consider it 'expected'.
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.
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.
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.
They don't want you to see the recurring bribes to the local politicians...
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.
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.
It likely wouldn't hold up in court very well, but also you'd have to be able afford that
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?
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2014/06/12/sea...
Years ago there used to be a problem with airlines charging extra non optional fees on their prices but that was largely solved. https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2006/jul/18/travel.mone...
Same goes for sales tax. It must be included in the price of the product when displaying the price. No surprises at the cash register.
How many people in Switzerland even have home networks capable of taking full advantage of those speeds?
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.
But realistically for most consumers the only difference between 100Mbit and 1Gbit is how fast their games download on their consoles.
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.
We also don’t have tipping culture, you can tip, but it’s not an expectation. Though, the latter is slowly creeping in.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course they can build something that is suitable. But they are a combination of [lazy, greedy, corrupt, under-resourced].
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.
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.
NZSIS has direct access to your network and 100% has a copy of that DNS traffic, including any and all metadata for every single person.
Domestic SIGINT in all five eyes countries is drag net, it's all collected, facilitated by ISPs.
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.
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.
This type of stuff seems crazy but it can happen!
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postmaster_Gener...
This model has worked well despite the volatile nature of US election and one party railing against the USPS being wasteful and should be privatized.
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.
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.
It's a fundamental rule of fiscal responsibility to account for every penny in the bill.
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.
Yes, they are.
> 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?
I personally believe there is a huge, recurring fraud going on that eclipses what e.g. Wells Fargo has been doing to its customers.
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.
- 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
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.
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".
It was a little comical when Biden said he is going to fight ticket fees and then this came: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases... Like they asked not to scam US consumer and they kindly agreed.
Heck, if only CA, TX and some other medium to large state passed something like this, it would probably push the industries over.
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).
https://www.techspot.com/news/93754-isps-continue-charge-unf...
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.
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.
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.
Snake oil salesman complains it's too difficult to sell snake oil.
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.
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.