Verizon Fined For Pretending That Limited Service Was Unlimited
from the watch-out-comcast... dept
Back in 2005, we noted that Verizon Wireless was following the tactics of others in advertising "unlimited" wireless broadband services, while the truth was they were quite limited. As people later worked out, despite the claim of "unlimited," VZW was cutting off anyone who used more than 5 gigs of data per month. That's pretty limited, actually. When confronted about this, the company tried to argue that by "unlimited" it really meant "It's unlimited amounts of data for certain types of data." And they followed it up with this gem: "It's very clear in all the legal materials we put out." Right, see, that's the legal materials -- the stuff you know no one reads. Yet in the marketing materials it's quite clear that you're claiming "unlimited" and that has a pretty clear meaning. After many such complaints, Verizon Wireless finally started to back down from the false claim of "unlimited" earlier this year. Turns out that it wasn't because of any realization that lying to your customers is a bad idea, but because NY State was investigating the practice. NY has now fined Verizon Wirelss $1 million to be given out to customers who had their service unfairly terminated for actually believing that "unlimited" meant "unlimited." Of course, Comcast might want to start paying attention right about now. While lawyers everywhere are rushing to file lawsuits over its decision to jam broadband user accounts, before that happened Comcast was famous for many, many years for being one of the biggest ISPs to lie about offering unlimited service. It's a story that comes up in the press every year or so, and every year Comcast gives its own doublespeak about how it only cuts off the worst "abusers." However, it's still false advertising to claim unlimited service when that's not what you supply -- and it's hardly "abuse" if people are merely doing what you told them they could do.
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Filed Under: fines, limited, unlimited
Companies: comcast, verizon
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Nothing new here
First
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Cost of doing business
The only punishment that will have an impact is directly fining a fiduciarily responsible person (C level executive or member of the board). Make it come out of that person's pocket (no insurance, corporate reimbursement policy, etc.).
Once a little personal responsibility is injected into the mix, behaviors might change.
However, there is exactly zero chance of this happening. In lieu of that, the fines must be punitive enough to catch the attention of Wall Street and major stockholders.
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Good Luck
A solution could be that, the CEO (add your flavor of C"blank"O) is fired w/o compensation for laying off folks and not giving a rats ass about anything other than the bottom line.
For those that are interested check out Gangs of America: The Rise of Corporate Power and the Disabling of Democracy. Open your eyes.
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Re: Good Luck
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I Dislike Corporate Thuggery But...
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I missed one point
I transfer between 5-8 GB per day, and I'm on Comcast! I've been making sure that I stay under 200GB/month though to stay nice and far beneath undisclosed caps.
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Re: I missed one point
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Fines are a joke for companies
Blue Hippo stole millions from customers with their pay as you go computer offer because they never would deliver the computer. The fine when they got caught? $300,000.00.
My dream is somehow all consumers will gather and come up with a plan to screw these bad businesses by hurting them in the pocket book. Is it possible?
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What I fail to understand...
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Where is the call for Corporate Ethics???????
I would think that those who oppose regulation would actively call for corporations to improve their ethics to avoid the imposition of onerous regulation. This obvious solution seems to beyond their mental grasp.
All I hear by the anti-regulatory crowd is that regulation "hurts" business. Ok if regulation "hurts" business and we live in a free market system where we are responsible for our actions; the obvious solution is act ethically. If corporations act ethically, there would be virtually no need for onerous regulation that would "hurt" business.
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Thanks Max, I have been wondering what the scam was behind Blue Hippo. The Blue Hippo ads were laughable. "We will give you a break and not check your credit". Of course they don't mention that you have to pay upfront.
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Re: Where is the call for Corporate Ethics???????
The best way to stop this behavior is to expose it. If the government wants to help, they can pump money into consumer education, so that we know how to compare services accurately. Verizon's practices cannot stand the light of day.
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They had the same problem between marketing and legal materials when the old Bell Atlantic first started selling DSL service. Marketing/Sales would say unlimited, but the ToS said otherwise. They fixed that.
The wheel turns round and round.
Woadan
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verizon wireless unlimited
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Bundle
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JAIL THEM ALL
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