USA?
USA…
Let’s be honest though. This policy was a chicken-shitted rule only a liberal could love. Should we ban ISPs from tacking on extra fees and simply charging the sticker price? No, instead let’s just require them to disclose it in the fine print!
What a wild world… Lived in the US my whole life… Figured I could do better else where so I left.
Now for internet I pay $22 a month and get symmetrical 700mbps…
8$ / month in Romania for 2Gb/s. Also, you can download ANYTHING here.
Yeah but minimum wage is 8$ / month and you have to choose between betting shop and internet every month. Like some kind of real life adaptation of “Papers, please”
I was looking at prices today, turns out I can get a symmetric and uncapped plan in Brazil that costs 1/5th of what I pay in the US. It’s a fucking cartel.
Chile too
I’m not far from either of those companies
eh so definitely not Germany then
Those poor ISPs…
Why does this administration hate the American people so much?
It’s not that it hates people! It just values their money and ability to take that money over everything else!
It hates poor people. And punishes those poor people by continuously poor-er-izing them
Which is everyone with a net worth less than 1 billion dollars
I don’t know… some of the shit they’ve been doing and saying really seems hateful (above and beyond greedy corruption) at times
Can someone share what fees they were charged while they were reporting it? In Europe my fees are:
- internet fee
What else can there be?
Meaningless vague stuff like this
“Deregulated Administration Fee” sounds like a fee for doing nothing
Sounds more like the fee they directly use for lobbying to reduce oversight on ISPs.
And now that they don’t have to report them, how do they ask you to pay for them?
Here in Finland, you sing up for an internet connection for a certain price a month, usually for 12/24/36 months at a time and… That’s literally it. E.g I have 250/250 fibre for 35€/month for the next year. If they want me to pay more, they’ll have to increase the price next year when I renew it.
It’s a slimy business tactic that applies the anchoring effect.
You’re shopping internet plans. You see a plan that seems like a good deal to you and meets your needs. The price listed in bold text on the website is $50/month. If you look closely, there’s a little asterisk referencing tiny text at the bottom of the page that simply says something like “plus additional fees.”
So you feel it’s a good deal, so you move forward. You enter all your personal info, everything needed to set things up. Then you get to checkout…and the price has increased to $70/month, inflated by a bunch of bogus fees.
You would think this wouldn’t make a difference in your decision-making, but it does. It actually changes what the average person is willing to pay. Among the reasons:
Anchoring: When you’re shopping, you’ve already subconsciously decided the plan is a good deal at $50. Then you put in the time investment to set up the account. When they spring the fees on you, your mind is in a state where it really doesn’t want to reconsider things. You’ve already finished the price comparison portion of the task! So even though you can see the price increase, the plan still subconsciously feels like it’s $50/month.
Anti-Competitive Behavior: these fees make cost comparisons much more difficult. The only way to see all the fees that your account will be charged is to go through most of the account sign-up process. You can’t just quickly pull up the websites of various ISPS and quickly compare their plans/rates.
In Spain I signed my contract about 5 years ago for 200/200 fiber and they no longer offer it so they changed it to 800/800 but the price stayed the same. The contract renews automatically every year.
Centurylink added a fun one for me, a building relocation fee, I shit you not.
They mailed me paperwork stating how they need to charge an extra fee for when roads expand or move, and they have to relocate a building. So instead of just setting aside some of their profit for the few times they’ll need to move a fucking building, now I get to specifically pay for this occurrence.
You were paying for it either way, they just broke it out as a line item.
I understand this, but now they get to double dip, have a high price, AND charge more. Instead of having all the pricing roled into the final price, they get to say $65/m *
- with additional taxes and fees
They also get to invent new situations to charge you for. Instead of just, “our service costs this much” they now get to add additional things like:
- Hail damage recovery fee
- Flood damage recovery fee
Who knows if they ever actually have to relocate a building like they told me. I’d like to see some figures in how often that actually happens, and how much it costs them as a company.
the slight difference is that now it doesn’t affect profits
Jesus, that’s insane.
Brendan Carr is a dummy.
