Comcast blasted for seeking “loopholes” in rule requiring disclosure of all fees.

  • fubo@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    59
    ·
    1 year ago

    If your billing is too complicated to be accurately described to your customers, then you may have put yourself in a situation where you are incapable of being honest with your customers. That’s on you.

    It’s the job of regulators to ensure that you are honest with your customers; therefore, they can reasonably forbid you from having billing so complicated that it cannot be described accurately.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      32
      ·
      1 year ago

      It’s funny, my local ISP tells me I owe X dollars a month and that’s what I pay. How on earth do they do that? Comcast is telling us it can’t possibly be that simple

      • fubo@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        19
        ·
        1 year ago

        The airlines managed to figure it out, weirdly enough. Calculating the price of an airline seat is Turing-complete, and at least one airline software service, ITA, needed the runtime compilation feature of Common Lisp to do it efficiently. Yes, when a user asked for a ticket price, their systems wrote and compiled a piece of code to determine the answer.

      • xavier666@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        1 year ago

        Many companies, specially telcos, have a complex scheme of paid plans to confuse the users so that they become fed up and say “ok, so how much do I have to pay”. This is their exact objective.

        My local ISP (not a part of some huge elite ISP) is similar to yours. Pay X and you get unlimited internet for a month at Y Mbps uplink/downlink. Somehow it’s too complex for Comcast.

        • GreyBeard@lemmy.one
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          Heck, my ISP, which is a huge elite ISP, has a simple number too. You know why? There is competition in this market. I pay $80 a month for 1000/1000 fiber. That includes free HBO Max. Not as good as Sonic, but it’s a simple number.

      • keeb420@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        mine even manages to do it for the price they advertise. and without a data cap. and without having to have a comcrap router in order to pay more to not have a data cap. i had my own router i didnt want to use theirs mine was better. but the only way i could find to pay to not deal with the cap was to have their router. fuck that.

        • psudo@beehaw.org
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Yeah, but are they making their faceless shareholders insane profits? I say this as a joke, but I do feel like that’s a large reason why Comcast and the like are so terrible to their customers.

      • misguidedfunk@beehaw.org
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        I’d love to have a local option. We get spectrum or wind stream, which means spectrum. They charge whatever they want because they have a pseudo monopoly.