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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

When I eat at a restaurant, that business is not paying a per-seating fee to the city it's sited in. But that's what the ISPs are doing.

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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).

Why does that matter?

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.

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 about labeling requirements at the point of sale, not about about the details of your bill, which already list these fees.

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?

They are allowed to list the maximum total price

No, in their objection they're specifically asking as an alternative to be allowed to do that.

They want to continue to spring it on you at the last step of signup

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

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.

No, it can't!

Why not?

If my bill looks like this:

$50 Steak Meal

$10.54 Municipal We Hate You tax

$5.87 Local ditch digging tax

$2.15 State paperwork shredding tax

$0.04 Federal fuck you tax

Why can't instead the restaurant just write on the menu:

$70 Steak ($50 + taxes and fees)

...and eat the costs itself? It's entirely within the businesses' power to do this. They choose not to.

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.

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?

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.

Either way, it really drives home the point that businesses don't pay taxes, the consumer does.

>ISP fees are usage taxes applied per-customer

Can you please explain what you meant by this?

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