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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
[+] [-] NickC25|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] eli|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] germinalphrase|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] TuringNYC|2 years ago|reply
I wish Google was able to achieve this with their GrandCentral acquisition, but as usual they Google let their acquisition wither away.
[+] [-] taylodl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcronce|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tnel77|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] luma|2 years ago|reply
Any regulator who takes this line of reasoning seriously is immediately suspect.
[+] [-] YeBanKo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wildrhythms|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thomas-st|2 years ago|reply
It is crazy they can't tell you how much you'll be paying before signing up.
[+] [-] Terr_|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nocoiner|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throitallaway|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] figassis|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] abwizz|2 years ago|reply
seems unreasonable for a consumer facing product, how did it come to that?
[+] [-] Ylpertnodi|2 years ago|reply
Crazy? 2023? I would consider it 'expected'.
[+] [-] tguvot|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Terr_|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] whaleofatw2022|2 years ago|reply
They don't want you to see the recurring bribes to the local politicians...
[+] [-] phendrenad2|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonethewiser|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TuringNYC|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throitallaway|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spivak|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonethewiser|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] laurencerowe|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] sterwill|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mh8h|2 years ago|reply
Of course they can build something that is suitable. But they are a combination of [lazy, greedy, corrupt, under-resourced].
[+] [-] muppetman|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zer8k|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] RajT88|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] abigail95|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] danuker|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkl95|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Volundr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badrabbit|2 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] michaelmrose|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mkl95|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spicybright|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|2 years ago|reply
It's a fundamental rule of fiscal responsibility to account for every penny in the bill.
[+] [-] smolder|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] xnx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javajosh|2 years ago|reply
I personally believe there is a huge, recurring fraud going on that eclipses what e.g. Wells Fargo has been doing to its customers.
[+] [-] theragra|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zzo38computer|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] doctorpangloss|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] supertrope|2 years ago|reply