Aww … poor little ISPs.
This is why the ISPs don’t want to do it. The FCC told them:
Providers are free, of course, to not pass these fees through to consumers to differentiate their pricing and simplify their Label display if they believe it will make their service more attractive to consumers and ensure that consumers are not surprised by unexpected charges.
The ISPs refuse to eat the costs of doing business. They know people will shit when they see all the fees that customers do not need to pay are being charged to them.
There will be lawsuits when the fees are listed.
Difficulty doesn’t make sense, because if they can charge you for it, then they can list it out on your bill.
Unless it’s a “we need to show profit growth to our shareholders” fee.
It’s not really about eating the costs of doing business. A restaurant doesn’t charge you $1 at the end of your bill for washing your fork, it’s just part of the cost of serving the dish and so your Salmon Rice dish is $18 not $17.
The point is that the listed prices for services should either have these fees be built right into the price…as pretty much all businesses do…or if you’re going to put it at the end of the bill then it needs to be clearly defined per FCC.
It’s a transparency problem. Not only is your $60 cell phone bill not actually $60 but then they also don’t tell you about the additional fees very well when they tack them on at the end. It’s gotta be one or the other, not neither.
Restaurants also don’t have a line item on their bill to make you pay for their anti-unionization efforts. ISPs, on the other hand, do often have a “regulatory recovery fee,” the purpose of which is to pay their lobbyists to fight regulators so they can continue to screw you.
Why does everyone try to prove everyone else wrong? That entire first paragraph is completely unnecessary. You can simply add to a discussion without being "well actually " about some detail you want to nitpick. The other two paragraphs are spot on.
Because it’s a meaningful distinction. The issue isn’t them passing the cost to their customers. It’s them lying about their prices instead of telling you what they’re going to charge you.
Not trying to prove you or anyone else wrong… that’s a really odd and unnecessarily defensive take.
It’s just a discussion.
It’s really one of the worst things brought over from reddit
I like to imagine people doing that in an every day conversation. It’s ridiculous. No one would ever talk to them lol
Seems like a friendly enough response was given to your comment and you automatically assumed they were only interested in saying you’re wrong.
Having a discussion is not “proving everyone wrong”
That was my point, thanks.
Gotcha, you don’t like discussions. Noted.
An increasing number of restaurants are pulling exactly this sort of bullshit–little 3.5% fees at the bottom of the total check disclosed only in fine print on the menu (if at all) tied to COVID, paying their staff, processing credit cards, etc. It needs to end. Pricing should be upfront so customers can compare what they’re actually paying, not snuck in at the end.
As a European I’ll never cease to find it mind blowing that it is normal for a Americans that the cost to them of damn near everything is more than the cost initially shown to them.
You’re completely right to feel that way. As an American, it’s mind blowing to me, too. I really don’t like the fact that “hidden fees” have become normal.
Traveling in the US it can often feel like everyone wants to scam you or take advantage of you if you don’t pay attention.
Heck, even store prices and restaurant prices aren’t the real price.
Store prices are without sales tax/VAT, and restaurants wants you to tip 20% so they can keep not paying their “employees”.
The tax drives me crazy. The excuse for not displaying the total price after tax is because it’s different for each state. …yet the cash register seems to be able to handle that perfectly fine. So it can’t that hard to figure it out.
Edit: after a quick look into it, the main problem is tax in a lot of places is based on the Total amount sold, not on each item. So that could definitely be impossible to display before hand.
after a quick look into it, the main problem is tax in a lot of places is based on the Total amount sold, not on each item.
I’m actually confused, aren’t taxes a percentage? The sum of a percentage of all items should be the same as a percentage of the sum, no? Or is my brain not do math good? Can someone smarter than me explain?
Hopefully someone can. Me no math good either.
!SeaJ@Lemm.ee shared this:https://www.taxjar.com/blog/retail/can-retailer-include-sales-tax-in-the-price
Say you list a table lamp on your website at $100, tax included. Well, if you sell that table lamp to a buyer in Connecticut (where the tax rate is a flat 6.35%) then you’re required to remit $6.35 in sales tax to the state of Connecticut on that transaction.
But if you sell the same table lamp to a buyer in Aberdeen, Washington, where the sales tax rate is 9.08%, then you’d be required to remit $9.08 in sales tax to the state of Washington.
As you can see, you are cutting into your profit margin by including tax in your pricing.
Further, US customers are accustomed to paying their local sales tax rates. We’re so accustomed to paying odd amounts in sales tax that paying a flat rate might surprise us or leave us a little confused.
This is anti-consumer bullshit nonsense. All they did was hid their only real “con” behind a wall of text. “As you can see, you are cutting into your profit margin by including sales tax”
And the last paragraph is fucking stupid too. People are too used to seeing numbers, so other numbers will confuse them!
100% agree
It’s actually only a few things. The vast majority of the goods we purchase are clearly priced. Most states (and some local jurisdictions like big cities) do have sales tax applied to purchases of non-essential goods, but those rates are generally much lower than the national sales taxes in most European countries.
Sales tax is the most obvious example of adding to the cost I’ve been shown, but it’s everything. Here if there is a price on something that is the price you pay. Period.
If I have €5 and the price on the shelf is €4.90 we are all good, and I don’t even need to know what country I’m in!But is is more than that, if I take my car in to be fixed, they have to agree every cost they want to charge me in advance at no point can anything cost me more than I expected and agreed to up front.
Airline tickets, theatre tickets, hospital bills, TV ads, you name it, the price they state or advertise is what I pay, no ifs-no buts.deleted by creator
I’m seeing it more and more. Little “processing fees” here and there, some tied to COVID, some tied to credit cards. There needs to be a clap-back against this behavior.
It’s not about having a sales tax applied to some or all goods or about how much that’d be. It’s about not listing the final price including the tax right until you’re supposed to pay for it. How dumb is that?
I love oregon, no sales tax so the listed price is the price. Now all these idiots moved here and are making changes as to why this place was nice. Like trying to implement a sales tax and getting rid of the urban growth boundary
It’s actually almost everything unless you live in one of the 4 States without sales tax.
It’s government mandated. We have variable sales taxes on every product. And it isn’t included in the ‘price’.
Stores can show out the door pricing of most products, they just won’t. It’s fairly common in the cannabis space because they don’t want to make change.
Comcast is sad that it can’t fuck us in hidden fees anymore. I feel terrible…just terrible for them.
Okay everybody - this is one of those good things that the Biden Administration and Democrats are doing to properly run government.
It is also something that most people will not know about. Why? Because it’s not a simple sound bite.
So my homework to all of us is to make sure our friends and Neighbors who are complaining about government not doing anything for us to point this and similar things out to them.
Real benefits, real work is almost never easily described in sound bites. So many people believe the Democrats don’t do what they say they’re going to do because getting s*** done is too complicated for most people.
Based FCC
I love when FCC at least appears to do something, not like under Shit Pai.
Frankly though they should revise Title II classification for the Internet and remove exception from the requirement to share last mile to competitors. This is the main reason there’s almost no competition. It doesn’t make sense for every single ISP to run lines to every home. Those lines should be leaseable.
based administration in the WH
They could always remove those complex fees and make the bill simpler…
🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
The Federal Communications Commission yesterday rejected requests to eliminate an upcoming requirement that Internet service providers list all of their monthly fees.
In June, Comcast told the FCC that the listing-every-fee rule “impose[s] significant administrative burdens and unnecessary complexity in complying with the broadband label requirements.”
The five trade groups kept up the pressure earlier this month in a meeting with FCC officials and in a filing that complained that listing every fee is too hard.
They complained that the rule will force them “to display the pass-through of fees imposed by federal, state, or local government agencies on the consumer broadband label.”
That would give potential customers a clearer idea of how much they have to pay each month and save ISPs the trouble of listing every charge that they currently choose to break out separately.
The FCC rules aren’t in force yet because they are subject to a federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) review under the US Paperwork Reduction Act.
Saved 67% of original text.
Why is it sometimes hidden by a dropdown, and sometimes the summary is just in the comment?
TL;DR: The bot is configured to condense certain instances and communities. At the moment, only beehaw.org is marked to be condensed.
Quickly looking at the source code, it seems
ReplyToPostsCommanduses aSummaryTextWrapper, which contains an iterable for bothCondensedSummaryTextWrapperProviderandDefaultSummaryTextWrapperProvider. TheDefaultSummaryTextWrapperProviderhas a priority of-1_000(so it’s always checked last) and is set to always returntrueon thesupports(Community $community): bool.CondensedSummaryTextWrapperProviderreferences the config/services.yaml for it’ssupports(Community $community): boolcall which lists 0 condensed communities and 1 condensed instance, being beehaw.org.
good bot!
Soon there will be a new fee, the “listing fees fee”
If you can’t list em, you shouldn’t be able to charge for em
Of all the technical challenges involved in doing what ISPs do, updating their billing process should be among the least “hard” things on the list. They just don’t want to do it.
Stop charging the fees that are too hard to list. Problem solved.
For those of us not American, can someone explain what fees are root talking about? Isn’t it like one fee of $X/month?
Suppose you buy an Internet plan for $50. On your bill, it’ll be $50, plus usually 5-10 other fees probably totaling around $5-10. Some examples from my cell phone bill are
- Fed universal service charge
- regulatory charge
- admin & telco regulatory charge
- gross receipts surcharge
- state public safety comm surcharge
- local public safety comm surcharge
- state sales tax
That’s 7 additional fees, whose names vary from somewhat comprehensible to uselessly vague. And you won’t find these prices until you get your bill. They’re not advertised directly, instead you’ll see that $50 advertised price, and a little asterisk that points to tiny text “additional fees may apply” that somehow make this all legal.
The FCC is saying if telcoms are going to add all these fees, they need to be part of the ad and not hidden.
This is about “fees” over and above the advertised “price”. So it says your plan is $65/month, but when you get your bill it’s actually $95 because there’s a “Cost Recovery Fee”, a “Network Maintenance Fee”, and a “Municipal Area Surcharge” (IIRC all real fees I’ve paid on an internet bill) on top of the advertised rate. They’re often meant to look like taxes, but they aren’t.
It’s all going to be fabricated bullshit anyhow, I don’t see why they don’t just lump it all under one bullshit fee and call it a day. They’re still going to rob people blind with or without this.
fun times
Aww it’s too hard… well make it simpler by not charging shitty little fees.
