Verizon to keep charging controversial fee despite $100M settlement
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
In EU shops are made to show price per kilogram / liter too.
I'm still not seeing why that experience requires an account, so while this response is academically interesting, it doesn't actually address the purpose of my comment. Any reason why these calculations can't be performed without an account? Any reason why needing to enter the street address is functionally different from needing to enter the zipcode for this functionality, or were you just attempting to add detail/nuance?
If Verizon advertises, say, $50/mo cellphone service, they're actually going to charge you an extra $15 or so, but they won't tell you what you're paying in taxes until you've actually signed up for the service and paid the switching costs. I want Verizon to advertise $65/mo ($50/mo base + $15/mo fees).
But how does Verizon run a national advertised price and include the taxes when telephone taxes vary based on your city, county, and state, and sometimes which part of the city/county.
If they mail it to you, then sure, they should be able to calculate it assuming your main service address is the same as your mailing address. But even if they have it in the window at their shop, they could include the taxes as if you lived at the shop, but actual taxes will be based on your service address.
- Use the highest possible taxes and fees for any address in the service area of the store. Nobody is going to feel deceived if it turns out they had to pay less money for their phone service. - Provide a low and high range of taxes and fees for that same area and fine print that taxes vary based on service location. Verizon can't charge more than the high amount, and the low amount has to correspond to at least one service area that is actually billed that amount. - Provide a table listing out taxes, fees, and total price for each tax zone within the service area. This could be combined with the other two, and probably should be available unless there's, like, 200 different tax zones in the area of the store.
All of these are a darned sight better than "we don't have to mention anything about taxes and fees until you're a month into the contract and they can be any number we please".
example: See Kentucky Revised Statues (KRS) chapter 139 section 210 paragraph 1: (PDF) https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/law/statutes/statute.aspx?id...
edit: cited example
[0] Read: subsidized by other places with lower tax rates
- laws are often written by lobbyists
- you can list the information on the shelf price ticket/in ads, and still show the out-the-door price most prominently
I don't care for sales tax/VAT as a policy matter, but even less do I like the mental overhead of having to mentally inventory it every time I go shopping. The only exception is when some stores do a 'we pay the sales tax' sale (presumably because it's easier than marking everything down individually), and for once the sticker price is what I pay at the register.
The total sales tax could be any of the following, depending on the location of the particular store in the city that the consumer actually buys from: 9.2%, 10.1%, 10.2%, 10.25%, 10.3%, or 10.5%.
How should that be advertised?
Similarly for services except the sales tax is based on where the service is consumed rather than on the location of the seller.
"Why are you defending an accused rapist/pedophile/murderer?"
>Is Verizon so hard up that they need random people to defend their shit business practices? I don’t get why you’re so invested in this morally reprehensible practice.
I'm not sure how you got the impression I support "their shit business practices". If you read my comments more carefully you'll see I was only arguing that from both a practical and legal standpoint, they don't have to change their behavior. I did not make any sort of normative claim.
Plaintiffs settling is hardly a "technicality".
Yes, unquestionably.
Is this morally reprehensible?
Unless your entire notion of "morality" is "what it's possible to get away with legally," yes, unquestionably.
Do they plan to continue doing this, despite it being abundantly clear that it's morally reprehensible and legally at least questionable?
Yes, that's the entire point of the article.
So yes: the plaintiffs settling is absolutely a "technicality" if what you're concerned about is justice, rather than pure legal procedure.
>Yes, unquestionably.
Here's a verizon brochure I dug up from 2016, when the alleged wrongdoing started: https://web.archive.org/web/20160709005827/http://www.verizo...
On page 10 the administrative fees are clearly spelled out. I think it's safe to say that the fees are buried, but is that "deeply misleading"? I don't know, because the question in fundamentally subjective. The same goes for "morally reprehensible".
>Do they plan to continue doing this, despite it being abundantly clear that it's morally reprehensible and legally at least questionable?
The article mentions they changed their marketing/communication materials to make it more obvious. It's not like they're doing everything the same. That would be dumb.
>So yes: the plaintiffs settling is absolutely a "technicality" if what you're concerned about is justice, rather than pure legal procedure.
Justice arguably includes legal procedure. Summarily executing a rapist on the scene isn't justice, even if we know for a fact the perpetrator did it.
What do you think they would be pleading to?
If you want to not admit guilt but also give up, you can also plea "No Contest" which is typically what you do every time you pay a traffic fine (i.e. Speeding Camera.
I prefer the term "Alford plea" because it is indicative of the common use. Alford was charged with murder and plead guilty because the prosecution was going to seek the death penalty if he didn't.
Where an innocent or guilty plea addresses the facts of the case, an Alford plea solely addresses the case itself. Someone who makes an Alford plea is opting not to address factual evidence, but conceding that they believe the jury is likely enough to convict that there is no reason to oppose it.
To get on my soapbox for a moment, the existence and prevalence of Alford plea's is an indictment of the US judicial system. It's something people plea when they're innocent, but don't want to risk the enormous penalty the prosecution will seek at trial. Trial sentencing has become tantamount to punishing someone for exercising their constitutional rights to a trial. The prosecution is fine with a slap on the wrist until you want to exercise your right to a trial, and suddenly nothing but a lengthy jail term is appropriate.
All because it would be more expensive to actually see justice carried out.
It really makes me wonder just how expensive it would be, in net, to nationalize and/or break up companies like Verizon, and force them to be good corporate citizens either by running them directly, or by cutting them down to a much more manageable size and actually giving them meaningful competition again for the first time in far, far too long.
Except in this case it's not really clear that taking them to trial would result in a guilty verdict against them. It's also possible that they get off 100% scot free instead. I don't know about you, but if I was a consumer I'd rather get a paycheck in the mail right now, than having both sides' lawyers rack up thousands more billable hours (which will be paid from the settlement and/or future bills) for an uncertain promise of a bigger paycheck and them being declared as guilty.
It sounds like what you want is the FTC to prosecute the case in lieu of the plaintiffs. That's possibly viable, but they also kind of have their hands full with Google.
[0] Yes, the alternative to an adversarial court system is literally the Spanish inquisition!
It’s not the Spanish Inquisition.