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Neither the FCC nor FTC has a particularly good track record of standing up to broadband and cable giants when it comes to their longstanding track record of anticompetitive behavior, price gouging, or nickel-and-diming their often captive customers with bogus, hidden fees.
Though occasionally one of the two agencies does step in to try make a bare minimum effort to rein in the industry’s worst impulses, such as the FTC’s attempt, unveiled last March, to force companies to stop making cancelling service a pain in the ass. As you probably already know, many companies require you jump through elaborate hoops if you want to cancel, upselling you the entire time.
The FTC’s proposed provision would make it just as easy to cancel a service as it is to sign up, requiring companies provide easy, “one click” access to cancelling service online. Said FTC boss Lina Khan at the time:
“The proposal would save consumers time and money, and businesses that continued to use subscription tricks and traps would be subject to stiff penalties.”
But the cable and broadband industry, which has a long and proud tradition of whining about every last consumer protection requirement (no matter how basic), is kicking back at the requirement. At a hearing last week, former FCC boss-turned-top-cable-lobbying Mike Powell suggested such a rule wouldn’t be fair, because it might somehow (?) prevent cable companies from informing customers about better deals:
“The proposed simple click-to-cancel mechanism may not be so simple when such practices are involved. A consumer may easily misunderstand the consequences of canceling and it may be imperative that they learn about better options,” NCTA CEO Michael Powell said at the hearing. For example, a customer “may face difficulty and unintended consequences if they want to cancel only one service in the package,” as “canceling part of a discounted bundle may increase the price for remaining services.”
Not to be outdone, Powell took things one step further and attempted ye olde “throw every argument possible at a wall and see what sticks” legal approach, at one point even trying to claim the FTC’s requirements would harm the cable industry’s first amendment rights (which makes no coherent sense):
“the FTC ‘proposal prevents almost any communication without first obtaining a consumer’s unambiguous, affirmative consent. That could disrupt the continuity of important services, choke off helpful information and forgo potential savings. It certainly raises First Amendment issues.’”
The cable and broadband industry makes its bundle pricing as complicated and punitive as possible, not only making it hard to simply outright cancel service, but often making it impossible to actually know how much you’ll pay for service in the first place. The goal isn’t just to rip you off; it’s to making pricing so convoluted that it’s hard to do price comparisons or understand how much you’re even paying.
Comcast and friends are already fighting a separate initiative by the FCC requiring they be up front and transparent about the specifics of your broadband line and how much it costs.
Again, this isn’t even regulators trying advanced policies like trying to regulate rates or encourage competition. These are just very basic initiatives trying to force lumbering telecom and cable giants to make pricing transparent and transactions easy. And even these efforts result in years of legal wrangling, assuming they can survive a rightward lurching, corporate-friendly court system in the first place.
And this all comes before the looming Supreme Court rulings designed to make U.S. regulators more impotent than ever. Defanging and defunding U.S. regulators always comes under the pretense that this will somehow result in unbridled innovation, when, as the cable and broadband industry routinely demonstrates, that simply couldn’t be any further from the truth.
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