Charter Spectrum's Bullshit 'Broadcast TV' Fee Soars To $16.45 Per Month

from the nonsensical-surcharges-may-apply dept

Like countless other American business sectors, U.S. cable and broadband providers have been using hidden fees to covertly jack up their advertised rates for much of the last decade. These fees, which utilize a rotating crop of bullshit names, help these companies falsely advertise one rate, then sock the consumer with a significantly higher rate post sale (often when locked into a long-term contract). They also let them falsely try and claim that prices haven't increased, when they pretty clearly have.

Back in 2014, Comcast introduced a new $1.50 per month surcharge on cable bills it called its "Broadcast TV Fee." Said fee was really just a portion of the cost of doing business for Comcast (programming costs), busted out of the full bill and hidden below the line -- again to help the company falsely advertise a lower price. Fast forward to 2020 and the fee is now $15 per month, per user, and growing -- despite a number of lawsuits (correctly) alleging that the fees are misleading and predatory.

And it's not just Comcast. Charter (Spectrum) has also heavily embraced such a fee, its own "broadcast TV surcharge" getting jacked from $13.50 to $16.45 a month starting in August:

Charter has raised the fee repeatedly—it stood at $9.95 in early 2019 before a series of price increases. At $16.45 a month, the fee will cost customers an additional $197.40 per year. Charter sells TV, broadband, and phone service under its Spectrum brand name and is the second largest cable company in the US after Comcast.

One other "handy" benefit to the fee (for Charter and Comcast) anyway, is that it lets the companies tap dance out of consumer "price lock" guarantees or promotional rates, by letting them pretend that arbitrary fee increases are not actual price hikes. Charter also imposes a slightly smaller Broadcast TV fee on its streaming TV plans, with that fee getting jacked from $6 to $8.95 a month. That's, of course, in addition to all the other arbitrary fees and surcharges tacked onto your monthly bill, including broadband usage caps and overage penalties.

It's the sort of running scam that would be prohibited by functioning, objective consumer protection regulators or lawmakers, were we to actually have such a thing.

Filed Under: bogus fees, broadcast tv fee, cable tv, fcc, ftc, price increase, truth in advertising
Companies: charter, comcast

AT&T Loses California Case After Lying To Consumers About 'Unlimited' Data Throttling

from the ill-communication dept

Back in 2014 the FTC sued AT&T for selling "unlimited" wireless data plans with very real and annoying limits. The lawsuit noted that, starting in 2011, AT&T began selling "unlimited" plans that actually throttled upwards of 90 percent of your downstream speeds after using just two or three gigabytes of data. AT&T spent years trying to wiggle out of the lawsuit via a variety of legal gymnastics, including at one point trying to claim that the very same net neutrality and FCC Title II rules AT&T was trying to kill prevented the FTC from holding it accountable.

Nearly a decade after the battle began, the company agreed last fall to a $60 million settlement with the FTC without actually admitting any wrongdoing. That $60 million, after lawyers get a cut, will be split among millions of customers who signed up for AT&T unlimited data plans before 2011. Moving forward, AT&T also has to clearly disclose any limits on its "unlimited data plans" in a conspicuous manner (read: not hidden via fine print or embedded in a hyperlinked asterisk).

But AT&T took another hit last week in a different five-year-old case in California over the throttling. There, AT&T's attempt to ban consumers from suing it for bad behavior was initially upheld by a court ruling in 2016. But a 2017 California Supreme Court decision effectively changed the state's arbitration law, resulting in that AT&T victory being overturned in 2018. AT&T appealed that decision but last week lost the appeal, allowing the case to proceed:

"AT&T appealed that ruling to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, but a three-judge panel at that court rejected AT&T's appeal in a ruling issued Tuesday. Judges said they must follow the California Supreme Court decision—known as the McGill rule—"which held that an agreement, like AT&T's, that waives public injunctive relief in any forum is contrary to California public policy and unenforceable."

"Because we are bound by our decision in Blair [another case involving the McGill rule], we hold that AT&T's arbitration agreement is unenforceable. Accordingly, we affirm the district court's order denying AT&T's motion to compel arbitration," judges wrote Tuesday."

While class action lawsuits certainly have problems (lawyers getting new boats while plaintiffs get pennies being chief among them), they have been known to shift corporate behavior now and again. And however flawed the US class action system is, the binding arbitration system is arguably worse, giving even more power to giant corporations like AT&T, who've already successfully lobbied federal consumer protection and antitrust enforcement into an apathetic coma.

Folks upset at states amping up their consumers protection efforts (see: net neutrality, privacy) should place the blame where it belongs: a wholly corrupted federal government that threw serious consumer protection and corporate accountability overboard thirty to forty years ago.

Filed Under: california, class action, data throttling, fcc, ftc, truth in advertising, unlimited
Companies: at&t

Washington And Oregon Fine CenturyLink For Completely Bogus Broadband Fees

from the gullibility-surcharge dept

For decades, broadband providers have abused the lack of meaningful competition in the telecom market by not only refusing to shore up historically awful customer service, but by raising rates hand over fist. This usually involves leaving the advertised price largely the same, but pummeling customers with all manner of misleading fees and surcharges that drive up the actual price you'll be paying each month. And by and large regulators from both major political parties have been perfectly okay with this practice, despite it effectively being false advertising.

CenturyLink (combined by the merger of Qwest, CenturyTel and Embarq) has been exceptionally talented when it comes to such fees. A few years ago the company began charging its broadband customers an "Internet Cost Recovery Fee," which the company's website explains as such:

"This fee helps defray costs associated with building and maintaining CenturyLink's High-Speed Internet broadband network, as well as the costs of expanding network capacity to support the continued increase in customers' average broadband consumption."

But the cost of maintaining broadband networks is what your entire bill is supposed to be for. Again, breaking out such additional bullshit surcharges and burying them below the line is designed to do one thing: help providers falsely advertise a lower rate. And while the "internet cost recovery fee" was only a few bucks per month, it's a fairly lucrative scam when spread across millions of CenturyLink's US broadband subscribers over the last five years.

With the federal government now largely comatose on such issues, states have been forced to step up to the plate and try to fill the void. As a result, Centurylink was forced to settle a lawsuit by Oregon's AG requiring it cease the practice and shell out $4 million to impacted consumers. That settlement comes several weeks after a similar settlement with Washington State's AG to the tune of $6.1 million:

"CenturyLink deceived consumers by telling them they would pay one price, and then charging them more,” Ferguson said. “Companies must clearly disclose all added fees and charges to Washingtonians. If you believe that a company has charged dishonest fees, please contact my office.”

In states where telecom regulatory capture is more prevalent (read: most of them), absolutely nothing is being done to thwart this practice, which extends to other fees like the misleadingly named "regulatory recovery surcharge" or the widespread "local sports surcharge" and $10 per month "broadcast TV" fees.

Keep in mind, these are precisely the kind of consumer enforcement actions the Trump FCC attempted to ban with its net neutrality repeal, which didn't just repeal net neutrality but attempted to neuter nearly all state and federal oversight of one of the least-liked and uncompetitive industries in America. The courts argued the FCC overreached, noting it can't eradicate its telecom protection authority, then try to ban states from stepping in to fill the void. The fact they even attempted the gambit should tell you all you need to know about the Ajit Pai FCC.

Filed Under: bogus fees, broadband, competition, consumer protection, extra fees, ftc, hidden fees, oregon, truth in advertising, washington
Companies: centurylink

New Law Finally Bans Bullshit Cable TV Fees

from the better-late-than-never dept

For a decade we've talked about how the broadband and cable industry has perfected the use of utterly bogus fees to jack up subscriber bills -- a dash of financial creativity it adopted from the banking and airline industries. Countless cable and broadband companies tack on a myriad of completely bogus fees below the line, letting them advertise one rate -- then sock you with a higher rate once your bill actually arrives. These companies will then brag repeatedly about how they haven't raised rates yet this year, when that's almost never actually the case.

Despite this gamesmanship occurring for the better part of two decades, nobody ever seems particularly interested in doing much about it. The government tends to see this as little more than creative marketing, and when efforts to rein in this bad behavior (which is really false advertising) do pop up, they tend to go nowhere, given this industry's immense lobbying power.

But something quietly shifted just before the holidays. After a longstanding campaign by Consumer Reports, The Television Viewer Protection Act of 2019 passed the House and the Senate last week buried inside a giant appropriations bill that now awaits President Trump’s signature.

The bill bans ISPs from charging you extra to rent hardware you already own (something ISPs like Frontier have been doing without penalty for a few years). It also forces cable TV providers to send an itemized list of any fees and other surcharges to new customers within 24 hours of signing up for service, and allows users shocked by the higher price to cancel service without penalty.

The bill's not perfect. Because of the act itself it largely only applies to cable TV, not broadband service where the problem is just as bad. And cable TV providers can still falsely advertise a lower rate, thanks to what appears to be some last minute lobbying magic on the part of the cable TV sector:

"Initial versions of the legislation actually had the provision as truth in advertising, so you had to advertise the entire fees,” said Jenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at Public Knowledge, a Washington-based public-interest group. “But it’s still an improvement over what currently exists, because you have a right to cancel after signing up."

The trick now will be enforcement by a government and FCC that has routinely shown it's entirely cool with industry repeatedly ripping consumers off with bullshit fees to the tune of around $28 billion annually:

"We seriously hope the cable industry doesn't try to game its way out of complying with a very straightforward disclosure requirement: let consumers know what they will actually pay each month once all the fees are tacked on to the advertised price,” emailed Jonathan Schwantes, senior policy counsel with Consumer Reports, which lobbied for this bill. “And we hope cable operators can do so well before the six month enactment date, and not ask the FCC for an extension for doing something so simple."

Filed Under: broadband, cable tv, hidden fees, television viewer protection act, truth in advertising

Google Stadia's Claims For Streaming In 4K Seem... No, Just No

from the like,-really-no dept

Google's Stadia product, the company's bid to get gamers to give up their consoles and PC rigs and instead partake in Gaming as a Service, has had a rocky rollout to say the least. The service was already up against America's pathetic broadband coverage and usage caps. Add to that the quite muted applause that came from press and public reviews, not to mention the Obamacare-like rollout of the product, and you have to wonder if this is the kind of hit to a product's reputation that is at all recoverable. It's nearly as though Google developed a list of things that are important to gamers specifically and went out of its way to ensure it would get failing grades on each item.

The latest issue is no different. To combat concerns about how streaming games would behave in terms of quality, Google made claims that the service would stream games in 4k resolution and at 60 frames per second. Reality, it would seem, doesn't line up with those claims.

Google’s Phil Harrison explicitly said that all games will be running at 4K 60fps, but Destiny 2 and Red Dead Redemption 2 simply don’t. Rather, they’re upscaled to meet that. Worse yet, there was a tweet that seemingly confirmed Red Dead Redemption 2 would run at 4K, but that tweet was swiftly deleted. Presumably Google was quick to prevent what would have been a blatant lie from being on its account knowing that the game was at a lower resolution.

Since the first reveal of Stadia, Google has bragged about the powerful hardware running the service and how it can handle 4K at 60fps without breaking a sweat, even leveraging multiple instances to better improve the quality. So far, though, we’ve yet to see Stadia actually pulling that off. If the company had said that some games ran at lower resolutions and relied on upscaling or even pushed the underlying hardware prowess less, this would be less of a problem. The same would apply if the settings these games run at on Google’s end were disclosed more obviously.

After the 9to5google.com post was initially published, Google reached out to them to clarify the whole situation. That clarification amounted to Google again stating that Stadia can run games at 4k and high frame rates, but that Google also gives publishers flexibility on how to deliver the streamed game to allow for the best experience, similar to how other streaming game services do.

There are a couple of problems with Google's pushback. First, it was Google that made the blanket claim about the resolution and frame rate Stadia would run at. To now clarify that by stating that developers can stream their games in other resolutions, or upscale them to 4k, deviates from that selling point. Disappearing tweets with similar claims only adds to the impression that all of this amounts to false claims to generate sales.

Second, whatever the specifics in Google's clarification, games that were promised in 4k instead look like muddled heaps of trash.

There is a great deal more in terms of images on Twitter comparing on-prem and streaming graphics. This, again, is another one of those things you cannot get away with when it comes to serving the gaming public. It's not as though it were some kind of secret that gamers really, really care about graphics and production values. A pitch to ditch a console or PC for versions of games that run more slowly and at lower graphical quality is a complete non-starter.

Much of the press for Stadia seems to conclude that game-streaming of this kind is a great idea that will eventually be awesome, but that Google is probably a handful of years too early with all of this. The real question, it seems, is whether Google has torpedo'd its reputation in this market to the point that it won't be able to sell this product even when it is ready.

Filed Under: 4k, stadia, streaming, truth in advertising, video games
Companies: google

'Unlimited' Data Plans With Very Obvious Limits Are Only Getting More Confusing

from the this-is-not-the-future-I-was-promised dept

Back in 2007, Verizon was forced to strike an agreement with the New York State Attorney General for marketing data plans as "unlimited" when the plans had very clear limits. Twelve years later and it's not clear the industry has learned much of anything.

After their efforts to strictly monetize usage didn't go well with consumers, wireless carriers around 2012 or so returned to offering unlimited data plans. But much like the unlimited data plans of old, these plans have all manner of bizarre restrictions. Verizon, for example, bans users from even watching videos in HD unless they sign up for more expensive plans. Carriers also throttle usage after you reach a certain amount of data for the remainder of your billing cycle. There are also limitations on how frequently you can use your phone as a tethered modem or hotspot.

AT&T's latest updates to its "unlimited" wireless data plans are no exception, and require an industry-lingo decoder ring and a few hours of fine print reading to actually understand. Here, for example, is how CNET framed the changes:

"Those looking for a mobile hotspot will need to jump to AT&T's Unlimted Extra Plan, which runs $40 per line, per month for a family of four. This plan adds 15GB of mobile hotspot per line and you won't have your data slowed until you've already used 50GB in a month and are in "congested" areas like a stadium (the Starter plan will slow down data if you're in a congested area and have passed 22GB).

There is no HD streaming on the Extra plan or Watch TV. While the Extra plan is $5 cheaper per line than Verizon's recently updated Play More and Do More unlimited plans, AT&T still does not offer the ability to choose individual plans for each line. Instead, if you want mobile hotspot for one line all of your lines will need to have the Unlimited Extra plan. Verizon's Play More plan also includes Apple Music and HD streaming.

The idea that a busy family looks at these caveats and actually has any real understanding of what they're buying is fairly hard to believe.

Granted wireless carriers implement this level of annoying complexity intentionally; they want to confuse users so they'll sign up for costlier plans they might not need in a bid to avoid the annoyances that have been intentionally created (upselling). Such annoyingly confusing caveats also make direct comparisons between wireless carrier pricing all but impossible. And, as usual, it makes it all but impossible to know what you'll actually pay for service until you get your bill, letting companies falsely advertise a lower rate.

And it's a problem that's going to get worse in light of the telecom sector's successful bid to have the FCC effectively self immolate at industry's behest. Killing net neutrality rules didn't just kill net neutrality rules. It weakened the FCC's authority over telecom entirely, and obliterated transparency requirements mandating that ISPs be very clear about what kind of connection you're buying. Anybody who thinks telecom's response won't be even more elaborate and bizarre nickel-and-diming restrictions hasn't been paying attention.

Filed Under: customer confusion, fcc, ftc, limits, truth in advertising, unlimited
Companies: at&t, verizon