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Comcast complains to FCC that listing all of its monthly fees is too hard (arstechnica.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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Comcast blasted for seeking "loopholes" in rule requiring disclosure of all fees.

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[–] 58 points 3 years ago (8 children)

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.

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  • [–] 26 points 3 years ago (7 children)

    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

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  • [–] 16 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years 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.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years 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.

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