Hacker News Reader

Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

Since they don't control taxes and at least some fees, it makes sense to me to exclude them from their price guarantee.

But to expect a company advertising something like a "price lock" didn't build in escape clauses for themselves is just being naive.

View on HN

Fees they do in fact control, otherwise they would be "taxes." Taxes are costs imposed by government, or legislation at any level. Cellular networks like to comingle the two so that they can hide "fees" they impose by wording them like taxes/confuse consumers.

For example: "Regulatory Recovery/Cost Recovery Fee," "Administrative Fee," "Network Access Fee," "Telecom Relay Service Surcharge," and "Local Number Portability" aren't taxes, but they look like taxes due to the misleading verbiage. These all go straight to the networks and in their books don't offset anything specific. These are your classic "what we can get away with fee."

This comingling of network fees and government taxes, and then wording fees like taxes, has worked incredibly well to the point that people online will defend them. Maybe TicketMaster should take note.

Governments do the same thing, they call something a "fee" instead of a "tax". Go try to get a building permit. There will be a "fee" imposed, which is a tax, but they don't call it that.

Except those fees are paid to the government. Stuff like "Regulatory Recovery/Cost Recovery Fee" is you paying for their costs of compliance, stuff that should just be part of the price since it's their expense.

It depends. I argued on the phone with Verizon for a long time (over an hour, going up and up the chain) about why a certain “Recovery Fee” was not in their per-line costs.

The answer (eventually) was that they do indeed pay the fee to government, but it varies with usage in a complex, government-defined formula in a bill from the 90s.

It doesn't matter what a Verizon customer service representative said. Recovery Fees are not a tax and are not paid to the government. There is no justifiable reasons why they're broken out into a separate line item except to hide the total cost of service.

By that logic, why stop there? Why not have Gas Taxes, Vehicle Registration Fees, Payroll Taxes, Corporate Property Taxes, or Permitting Fees as separate line items in the cellular bill? Which may sound absurd, but that's identical logic to most of the existing non-tax fees.

Some of these fees are, indeed, paid to the government. That does not mean they are a tax, in the same sense that (as mentioned elsewhere) a building permit is not a tax, but is still required by, and paid to, the government.

I'm not trying to excuse Verizon for not including them in their overall pricing, but these two in particular:

- Fed Universal Service Charge

- Regulatory Charge

are both paid to the government, and variable based on usage.

Edit: I will also note that Verizon has a $3.50 per-line fixed line item called "Admin & Telco Recovery Charge" that is utter BS.

> Some of these fees are, indeed, paid to the government. That does not mean they are a tax

It actually means exactly that. A building permit is also a tax. If it is paid to the government (any government of any level) by force of law it is a tax; calling taxes "fees" doesn't make them any more not taxes.

If they said all "taxes and other government fees" that would be better, I suppose. But they don't say that, and their current fees aren't all government originating, ultimately making this price lock completely meaningless.

American telecom companies have been caught making up fees that don't correspond to any government-imposed tax. Sometimes they do control that portion of the bill.

Which is why I said "some" fees.

But they didn't include "some" fees in the price lock did they?

The whole "price lock" concept is a blatant marketing ploy in the first place. As always, "buyer beware" and read the fine print. "Certain exclusions may apply."

https://youtu.be/AtK_YsVInw8

> As always, "buyer beware" and read the fine print.

And what some of us consumers are saying is enough of this bullshit. Corporations should not be able to promise something, and then walk back the entirety of the promise in the fine print. If you want to advertise it, then it had better be true.

I hear the tax argument all the time but it doesn't make any sense to me. Taxes don't change daily. The retailer knows the final price and they can accordingly show that price to customers. In Texas the sales tax is 8.25% and it has stayed that way for years. Our receipts at any retailer will show only the sales tax as an additional charge. In comparison, the actual prices of goods and services have changed (increased mostly) way more frequently, particularly in 2021-2024 period. So the argument here is that the seller has no problem changing the price labels when they want to increase the prices but somehow printing the labels with taxes which take years to change is a burden.

Mint has had flat rates from day one. T-Mobile wholly owns them now and doesn't seem to have a problem with that payment structure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com