Overbilled Customer Sues Time Warner Cable For False Advertising 223
An anonymous reader writes According to a lawsuit filed Friday in a New York court, when Jeremy Zielinski signed up for Time Warner Internet service after seeing an ad that it was $34.99 a month, he didn't expect his first bill to be more than $94. He didn't expect he'd have to fight for weeks to resolve it. And he didn't expect that, Time Warner's next step would be to sell him faster speeds, not bother to tell him his modem couldn't handle them, send him a bill anyway, then demand that he drive to the local office at his own expense to get a compatible modem. So he's taking the cable giant to court, accusing it of false advertising and deceptive business practices. While a lone individual fighting in court against the second largest cable company in the world certainly doesn't have the odds in his favor, this could get interesting. According to the complaint, he opted out of TWC's binding arbitration clause a few days after he opened his account, so he might have a shot of keeping this issue in real court. Stay tuned for more.
I hear the sound of big business (Score:2, Funny)
and it sounds like a heard of lawyers heading his way...
Re:I hear the sound of big business (Score:5, Funny)
I herd it was a hole heard full of wholes.
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Just don't make a class action out of it unless you are willing to settle for a coupon worth less than your cost to cash it in.
Re:I hear the sound of big business (Score:4, Insightful)
The person who initiates a class action usually gets a pretty good payout, too.
Good for him! (Score:5, Interesting)
Comcast tried to steal $50 from me (Score:5, Interesting)
Comcast offered a $50 cash card if we signed up for internet service with them. We signed up in May, and the card never came. We called and they denied that they ever offered the card. A few more calls later, they agreed that they offered it and said they would send it. It never came. Last month, five months, a final call was made and the card arrived.
Clearly they have a strategy of screwing customers, either through intentional scripting or extreme negligence.
Re:Comcast tried to steal $50 from me (Score:5, Insightful)
Comcast offered a $50 cash card if we signed up for internet service with them. We signed up in May, and the card never came. We called and they denied that they ever offered the card. A few more calls later, they agreed that they offered it and said they would send it. It never came. Last month, five months, a final call was made and the card arrived.
Clearly they have a strategy of screwing customers, either through intentional scripting or extreme negligence.
The *only* reason to offer some sort of price promotion later instead of just giving you the discount up front and making you sign a contract (even for three months of service) is so that they can roll the dice on customers signing up after being enticed by the promotion, and then not claiming the promotion. Rebates work the same way. Why is it that we can pass a thousand consumer protection laws about credit card interest rates and privacy disclosures, but can't just ban the blatant rip-off of rebate promotions?
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can't just ban the blatant rip-off of rebate promotions?
If the company honors the rebate as promised, and provides the terms of the rebate up front, then it's not a rip-off. If they don't, well, then that's fraud -- there are already laws against it, although I wouldn't mind seeing more enforcement of those laws.
Why should the government prevent competent adults from entering into an agreement that includes a rebate? Sure, the companies are hoping that many will not claim it, but that's the customer's choice.
I don't like the hassle of rebates myself (when I co
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Why should the government prevent competent adults from entering into an agreement that includes a rebate? Sure, the companies are hoping that many will not claim it, but that's the customer's choice./quote> Because as you say the companies are actively planning to make the advertised price/rebate not possible, or very complicated for the customer to get. Most rebates only serves to confuse the customer, so they can't see the real cost. This is not honest business.
For the customers to compare products, with such complicated pricing schemes is just not feasible; it would take days to evaluate. In many cases it is fraud, just very hard to prove intent when companies claim institutional incompetence.
Either way, it is a government issue to promote and ensure a transparent market that facilitates competition.
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can't just ban the blatant rip-off of rebate promotions?
If the company honors the rebate as promised, and provides the terms of the rebate up front, then it's not a rip-off. If they don't, well, then that's fraud -- there are already laws against it, although I wouldn't mind seeing more enforcement of those laws.
Why should the government prevent competent adults from entering into an agreement that includes a rebate? Sure, the companies are hoping that many will not claim it, but that's the customer's choice.
I don't like the hassle of rebates myself (when I compare prices, I don't take rebates into consideration), but I don't need the government making that decision for me.
When rebate clearinghouses (the ones who actually fulfill the rebates, maybe) advertise their services as having "the lowest redemption rates" meaning basically that they are the best at scamming customers out of rebate money, something truly fucked up is going on. I agree that regulation should be used very sparingly but the whole premise of a rebate (as it is executed currently) is to entice someone into buying something with the speculation that many of them wont actually fulfill the rebate offer and ge
Re:Comcast tried to steal $50 from me (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, rebates serve two different purposes. It allows the manufacturer to pass along a price cut to the final buyer without affecting its contract pricing with distributors and retailers. And it allows manufacturers to make price cuts (sometimes rather large ones) without having all of the product bought up by middlemen - e.g. eBay resellers who quickly snap up all of the available inventory at the lower price and list it on eBay at close to the original price (rebates are typically limited to a certain number per household address).
The rebate companies hired by manufacturers to run the rebate programs work as you say. They get paid a lump sum by the manufacturer, and get to keep anything left over after paying out the rebates. So they have an incentive to stall, lose, and deny your rebates. But the reason rebates exist are legitimate and have nothing to do with ripping off consumers. In fact the second reason actually helps consumers (by cutting out flippers who drive up the price).
Re:Comcast tried to steal $50 from me (Score:4, Insightful)
Rebates have other purposes.
One differentiation from a normal plain price cut is info. In this case, you're a Comcast customer and they have said info, but in the general buying-from-a-store sense its a good source of buyer info. if i bought, say, a ShopVac and I had a mail-in rebate, then ShopVac has the name and mailing address of a ShopVac customer. They're now free to use that information in certain ways, such as junk mail, sending me mail for add-ons, etc.
Second is price discrimination. If somebody wants to give me 200 for this, I don't want to get in his way. If someone will only pay 150, well, I have a 50 rebate card he can send in for. There's some effort in the rebate card and maybe the guy who paid 200 loses the receipt or just doesn't want to bother with mailing it in. That's an extra 50 for the seller, called producer surplus.
Back when Joel Spolsky wrote more, he had an excellent primer on pricing [joelonsoftware.com]. It's written from a producer point of view, but it's a a good read for consumers as well. If you know about producer surplus, you know where you can start negotiating on prices as a buyer.
Because they use all that extra money (Score:3)
to buy lawmakers and "lobbyists". Where is the anti-rebate money going to come from? Exactly.
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deal with the fact that it is probably a debit card or a store use only card, probably has decreasing balance if not used, charges for checking balance, no actual cash value, etc.
The best way (for me) that I have come across to handle rebate debit cards is to, on receipt of the card, immediately purchase an Amazon gift card with the full amount of the debit cart. This works great for me because I know I will be spending money at Amazon at some point anyway, and now I don't have to worry about keeping around the rebate card, the card expiring, or leaving the card with $1.27 left on it which then becomes difficult to spend.
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It's more about buying a $100 product at a store that has a $30 rebate, and forgetting or not filing the paperwork to get the money back, instead of, you know, just offering it as a direct rebate or coupon to the seller and allowing the customer to buy it at $70 out of pocket. I'm sure the claim rate of rebates is not 100%, and it probably isn't over 50% if I had to guess.
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Download the record everything app from the Google App store and keep every call when you dial Comcast. Then post all calls onto sound cloud
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Isn't the "record everything app" the default state for most of the apps you download from the Google App store?
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Comcast offered a $50 cash card if we signed up for internet service with them. We signed up in May, and the card never came. We called and they denied that they ever offered the card. A few more calls later, they agreed that they offered it and said they would send it. It never came. Last month, five months, a final call was made and the card arrived.
Clearly they have a strategy of screwing customers, either through intentional scripting or extreme negligence.
Not just telecomms companies - I'm currently being screwed over by Npower. I was a customer for 18 months, during that time I got a single correct bill and had to spend hours chasing them to get the others corrected. My original contract gave me a discount on the billing anniversary (January) - they never credited the discount, so I raised a dispute in January and they agreed to credit it. Except it never got credited. In the summer I left them as a customer, filed a complaint (about the shiteness of th
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To be honest, you should be glad you got out with just $50. I'm in a location where Comcast is pretty much my only option (thanks FCC) and I feel I'm getting hosed for more than that on every bill.
Re:Comcast tried to steal $50 from me (Score:5, Insightful)
Never attribute to malice what could be explained by stupidity. Eg they could unintentionally be profitting millions and they have no clue why because they never audit the department managing the cash card offers.
They know not to ask questions to which they do not want to know the answers.
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exactly...and the allowance of the continued stupidity becomes passive malice. Don't do harm through action or inaction. Even our robots can handle that.
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Although it could be a combination of both malice and stupidity. Higher ups could maliciously staff up the card offer department with the most incompetent, logistically-challenged employees (who for whatever reason they can't/won't let go - yet) figuring that if the cards don't all get sent out it's no big deal.
So there are 2 reasons why you don't get the gift card you were promised - you didn't get the card because the guy in charge of distributing them only has a job because his brother in law is one of
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Re:Comcast tried to steal $50 from me (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that the stupidity explanation has stretched credulity to the breaking point. All those 'errors' across all those departments and they somehow manage to (practically) never err in the customer's favor. The odds of that are so long that even the most generously trusting person would have to suspect there was some sort of systematic effort to make things happen that way.
Re: Comcast tried to steal $50 from me (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously the Republitards are going to side with big cable
Must you make this partisan? Comcast bought *everybody* off. http://www.nationalreview.com/... [nationalreview.com]
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And I think we all know how Mr. Zielinski's court case will turn out when TW's massive legal power comes to bear on him. Without fe
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I was with you until you spewed crap about republicans. Obviously you do not know what you are talking about because the law has been on the books and remains on the books despite republicans having control of congress and the presidency in the recent past.
Try keeping politics out of places it doesn't belong. Especially if you checked, you would know 2/3 or better time warner political contributiones go to democrats. If any politicisn would actually be against the consumer here, it is more likely to be them
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Which brings me to my main point: we need to financially support Jeremy Zielinski so tha
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republicans: the corporations must succeed at all costs! down with the people (and i don't mean corporations when i say 'people')
republican supporters: huh?
republicans: we hate gays. and immigrants.
republican supporters: oh, you have our vote!
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Re: Good for him! (Score:2)
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Now wishing Slashdot had an Edit button so I could block that Blockquote tag.
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Perfect example of a Confusopoly [wikipedia.org]. Make it just annoying enough so that the bulk of the people will just say "screw it" and the company makes a lot more money (or loses way less money than they would have).
Reminds me of the hoops that you used to have to go through to get rebates on electronics back in the 90's. It should have been simple: "fill out this form, cut the UPC code off of the box (making it impossible to return), wait 4-6 weeks, deposit the check". Unfortunately, a large percentage of the time
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I always add an entry to my calendar at the same time I mail off a rebate. If it says 4-6 weeks, the calendar entry is for 8 weeks out. I put the rebate confirmation number (if online) and all the details on the event entry.
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Because marketing.
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My co-worker had the exact same issue. I'll go ahead and attribute it to incompetence rather than malice, but that doesn't make it much better. The harm is the same.
Re:Good for him! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll go ahead and attribute it to incompetence rather than malice,
If the bottom line of the company on average benefits from the incompetence then I attribute it to malice.
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It's real easy. It's not a big company that can't do it, because companies aren't living things and can't do anything, they are just ideas. It's their employees who don't care, but more often, simply aren't empowered to do the right thing. The marketing department can't will things to happen just so. If the people who have an influence on this process can't or won't make it happen, it doesn't happen. It's as simple as that. Corporate HR has lost the human touch long time ago.
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I doubt anyone working at AT&T actually had a sinister plan to advertise a $200 promo and offer only $100.
At these big companies it's more likely due to corporate disorganization, with one department not knowing what the other department is doing. The promotions are developed by marketing geniuses, who tell the IT people to put them into the computer, then at point-of-sale they're supposed to be able to locate the promotion in the computer. That fails, so then you call customer-service where the people
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That, and they want people in the stores to get sold protection plans and overpriced accessories.
Could be the case. The guy asked me if I wanted to get accessories with it, and I told him to just put it on my account. AT&T is the last place I'd buy accessories from, I noticed they still had cases for the iPhone 4 for $50 on the rack!
TWC are (surprise, surprise) crooks and thieves (Score:5, Funny)
I noticed a $10 line item on a recent TWC bill for "Home WIFI." I went through the chat option on their website to inquire what this was, and how TWC might think it is provisioning wifi in my home despite my owning my own cable modem and WAP. They told me that they could remove the line item, but that wifi would no longer work in my home. Laughable nonsense. I called their bluff and my bill dropped $10. I wish I had saved a transcript of that chat. They prey on people who don't know any better.
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Re:TWC are (surprise, surprise) crooks and thieves (Score:4, Insightful)
I think technically it's fraud, isn't it?
They didn't steal from you, they charged you for something they weren't giving you.
Of course, getting that sorted out is damned near impossible, and even if you did get them in court they could plead incompetence.
And, of course, their 'license' for their service probably says that you agree to this.
It really is time to take some of the power out of the hands of the corporations here.
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They didn't steal from you, they charged you for something they weren't giving you.
They probably thought they WERE giving it to him since many cable modems these days also serve as wi-fi routers. The local cable company installs a wi-fi capable router by default with new installs these days, and they charge for that feature. Don't want it? They give you a standard non-gateway cable modem, and don't charge the fee.
Re:TWC are (surprise, surprise) crooks and thieves (Score:5, Insightful)
It's things like this that make someone who is conservative and pretty much Pro-Business agree with Obama that these people need to be declared Public Utilities and suffer all the usual regulations.
Right now, Cable companies are gaming the system. They claim to be competitive businesses and that they should not be regulated like a utility, yet they enjoy the protections from competition typically enjoyed by Utilities.
My neighborhood has Time Warner and AT&T DSL. AT&T was only able to provide internet because they had the phone lines. As it stands now Verizon, Google, or anyone else who wants to provide broadband, can't because of the franchise agreements. Time Warner can fuck you in the ass and all you can do is beg for lube because no other company is going to think, "hey, we can do a better job at a lower price" and then provide service because the Government (local) won't allow it.
So Two Options...Declare all exclusivity/franchise agreements null and void and allow anyone with the capital to lay/string lines and provide service, or declare these fuckers utilities and MANDATE levels of service or tell them to GTFO and let someone else provide it.
Re:TWC are (surprise, surprise) crooks and thieves (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. The big ISPs are claiming that they can police themselves and don't need government regulation. Meanwhile, they are abusing their monopoly/duopoly positions to grab as much money as they can from consumers. About the only entity large enough to scare them back into some semblance of sanity *IS* the government. It's not an ideal solution, but the ISPs only have themselves to blame for being greedy and sleazy.
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That's the same excuse the banks and Wall Street firms were using in 2005-2008 until their incompetence caught up with them at which point they immediately said, "The government has to do something" (to protect us were the unsaid words). It ended up costing we taxpayers over $3 trillion to prop up these failing businesses, as well as the ongoing QE shenanigans, and to this day not a single firm has ever sai
Re:TWC are (surprise, surprise) crooks and thieves (Score:5, Interesting)
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How about a compromise? Make the last mile providers utilities and require them to allow other ISPs to sell on their infrastructure. Since the infrastructure in many areas was a government granted monopoly when it was put in, regulate the rates that they can charge ISPs, but let the ISPs compete on prices, speeds and features. I remember when DSL was this way and I thought it worked pretty well.
And then you'll get the situation we have in Canada [which is bad]
Or you might get the situation in the UK, where I can choose from a wide range of providers at a wide range of prices and service levels. A few lay their own fibre and connections, most of the better ones lay fibre to the phone exchanges and have some routing equipment inside, the cheap ones lease everything from BT and save money (compared to BT) with customer service and usage limits (but plenty for my grandma, who pays £2.50/month or so for a few GB to check her email and chat on Skype).
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So Two Options...Declare all exclusivity/franchise agreements null and void and allow anyone with the capital to lay/string lines and provide service, or declare these fuckers utilities and MANDATE levels of service or tell them to GTFO and let someone else provide it.
Asymmetry of information really plays a hard role in this. TWC no doubt entered into an agreement with the muni that controls the utility right of way, such that there was a quid pro quo (they install coax and boxes and pay a franchise fee and they get a 10 year exclusivity agreement, or similar) and of course the local lawmakers ate it up because people moving into an area aren't going to look into local laws about media service agreements, they are just going to know the place is cable-ready. When cable
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Time Warner can fuck you in the ass and all you can do is beg for lube
Hey, look at the bright side there's still the TW option. Comcast is planning to buy TW, and there won't be any begging for lube.
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that's actually fraud. some law firm should pick up on that and sue. probably millions in these charges across their customer base.
Micro Center recently told my mom when she bought a new computer that her existing 3 yr anti-virus service that she paid some stupid amount for won't transfer to her new computer (same OS) and that she needed to buy a new 3 yr license. Of course it installed and activated in a few minutes on her new computer later that day. So fraudulent.
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One way that we can combat fraud like this is to simply record phone calls, but those abilities are hobbled on all current phones unless you root them.
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Google Voice: press 4. Of course you have to find a way to make them call you...
Re: TWC are (surprise, surprise) crooks and thieve (Score:2)
It's too bad, really (Score:3)
It's too bad this plaintiff will have a difficult time outlasting the cable giant's efforts at playing lawsuit.
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It'll get paid sometime between the hours of 2PM and never.
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How many times do you think there has been a legitimate lawsuit that should be filed and tried but never saw the light of day or was seen to the end because the plaintiff didn't have the resources to keep it funded to the point they had their day in court?
I suspect it's a lot.
Make all lawyers like public defenders... paid for through taxes, with bonus incentives for winning cases or something. So, when a lawsuit is filed, both the plaintiff and the defendant get assigned
Piracy Precident (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Piracy Precident (Score:5, Informative)
If you can get fined millions of dollars for stealing a 5 cent mp3, then certainly overcharging someone in the range of ~$100 is bound to bring in Billions of dollars in damages.
When big corporations do it, it's "different".
Re:Piracy Precident (Score:5, Funny)
I can't find Precident in the Wiktionary. Is he the guy that governed the country before the current one?
How is he related to 5 cent, the famous rapper you mention?
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No, you're talking apples and oranges here. The $100 is for services, which aren't really very valuable. The 5 cents was for *copyright infringement* which we all know is worse than murder. I'm surprised they haven't bumped that up to the death penalty yet, to make the punishment fit the crime.
Way past time to break it up (Score:2)
[...] the second largest cable company in the world [...]
There's (a huge part of) your problem right there.
This will fail.... (Score:5, Insightful)
For starters he filled his complaint with a bunch of throwaway lines that seem aimed at impressing the /. crowd but which are not relevant to his case and run the risk of annoying the Judge:
"Browsing through the TWC website, Plaintiff encountered an advertisement for a "Standard" Internet access line. While the rest of the modern world, and even otherwise-third world countries, enjoy substantially faster and better-value Internet access lines" <--- Not relevant and inflammatory
"After logging in, Plaintiff was able to view an online statement for his account. Plaintiff expected as a result of the advertising that his bill would be $34.99, plus perhaps some small amount in taxes. To his shock, however, the bill was nearly three times that amount – it was $94.45. Although the Internet service was advertised at $34.99 per month, Plaintiff was billed $39.99 for it. There was an unexplained "Internet modem lease" fee of $5.99 added to the bill, and an "Internet, Install service" fee of $47.99 added as well. The bill also included charges for services not yet rendered." <--- Month ahead billing is a standard practice in many industries, ranging from real estate (rent is due on the 1st, not the 31st) to telecommunications. This claim will fail.
He did have valid claims about the unadvertised install fee and price difference of $5/mo but by his own admission TWC waived the former fee while putting him on a $20/mo plan. He therefore he has no cause of action on either of these complaints. They will be disposed of with a simple motion to dismiss by the defendant, without ever being litigated. His complaint about not receiving promised speeds will fail, since the DOCSIS 2 modem they provided him with is theoretically capable of delivering the 20/2 speed he subscribed to; also, by his own admission he signed up for an "up to" service. The only complaint that may succeed is related to TWC's advertised list of "approved" modems, though I doubt very much a State Court is going to wade into such technical matters.
Disclaimer: I have no lost love for TWC and certainly have shared his aggravation when I've had the misfortune of dealing with them. In this case though? His own complaint tells me they made a good faith effort to resolve these issues. It was certainly aggravating for him but aggravation is not a cause of action in our legal system. TWC could win the majority of these points without even filing a response, based solely off what the plaintiff writes in his complaint.
His case is so thin that TWC could probably win a motion for court costs; I highly doubt they'll do that, the negative press would outweigh anything they'd gain, but they could if they were so inclined. This will end with TWC offering a settlement and writing it off as a public relations expense. If he refuses the settlement he'll look that much worse in the eyes of the Judge; Judges hate litigants who reject reasonable settlements.
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This needs modded to +6. He has no valid claim.
I respect the effort (Score:2)
What is the Next High Bandwidth Tech? (Score:3)
Breaking up the cable companies probably wouldn't do much without a new technology introduction. Break up of AT&T worked in retrospect because of advances in cell phone transmission, a leapfrog technology. Otherwise the Baby Bells would have still owned the local cable (like Fairpoint in New England).
I despise so much about Comcast. They have tech support / sales entertwined... Phone support techs in faraway lands read scripted lines like "your modem is at end-of-life". The "tech's" only knowledge of my modem is that it isn't rented from Comcast, can't tell me anything else? C'mon Tech Supporter! ...If you know it's "end of life" you must know when I bought it and must know what it is, right..? Ohhh... All you know is there's no monthly rent charge? Unfortunately, for now it's the fastest and cheapest bandwidth I can get. No other company is going to run a cable to my house. I doubt making "Baby Comcast/TWC" changes that. There has to be a technical advance, probably via satellite service. When Direct TV can compete technologically, cable will play nice.
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Phone support techs in faraway lands read scripted lines like "your modem is at end-of-life".
Well I had Comcast inject HTML into my http stream in order to tell me that my DOCSIS 2 modem was not going to be supported and that I needed to upgrade. I got a pop-up appearing when I viewed a non-comcast website, telling me that I had to upgrade (and yes I have a screen cap of that popup)
I believe that they were really hinting that I needed to update my perfectly fine DOCSIS 2 modem to a DOCSIS 3 modem purely for their benefit and were using text like
Your modem will no longer be able to operate on comcast's network
Even though their website says that DOCSIS 2 modems
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Code injection is a CFAA violation. Especially since it bypasses security measures put in place (pop-up and ad blockers.)
You should be filing criminal charges.
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Why don't they just send an email?
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That's because they're probably going to remove the channels that were reserved for DOCSIS 2 at a later time and use it for more overcompressed digital HD or ppv channels.
And even if your DOCSIS 2 modem is capable of that speed, that speed is shared among everyone on your node. The maximum capacity for your node is the DOCSIS 2 speed limit. Not just for you.
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Comcast, Time Warner and other cable companies were originally TV companies. they laid their cable in the 80's and 90's and offered ONLY TV services. they didn't start offering internet until around 1999 and mostly not until 2001 or so as an add on to cable TV. the phone part came around 2003 after vonage came out.
they didn't lay their cables to compete with the baby bells and didn't lay in each other's territories because it was no point in having 2 or three companies offering the same channels for the sam
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Cell phones had nothing to do with helping the breakup of AT&T. The breakup was about long distance phone service. Bell Systems owned the termination points (the switching equipment directing calls
TWC (Score:2)
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i'm in IT for another small telecom and help update the taxation database monthly. you won't believe it, but taxes and fees literally change every month.
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Time Warner Experience Not Uncommon (Score:2)
Not with Internet, but with regards to cable service - I called around a couple of years ago to TW, Dish, DirectTV (the providers in my area). Dish and DirectTV were able to tell me exactly what my costs would be Time Warner was advertising it's "First year for $X.xx" plan - so I asked them what I thought would be a simple math question - "What is my bill going to be after the yearly promotion ends?" The answer, "We can't tell you that." (that's a direct quote). So I further inquired as to why they cou
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While I mostly agree with you, there may be some honesty in that answer - they don't precisely know what rates will be in a year and don't want to quote you something that you can hold against them if rates change. Still, they ought to be able to tell you what the non-introductory rate is currently.
Then there's also the fact that after the first year if you call and threaten to quit most companies will make some minor fiddly adjustment to your plan and give you the introductory rate a second or thir
Please get word to him... (Score:2)
Comcast tried to bill me for my own modem (Score:2, Interesting)
Canceled Comcast internet and got a letter in the mail a few weeks later saying they were withholding my prorated refund check until I returned their modem. I have never own one of their modems and have never been billed for one of their modems. That took 2 hours on the phone to get straight.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
all that's going to come out of this... (Score:2)
...is that TWC will remove the ability for anyone to opt-out of binding arbitration.
sounds familiar (Score:2)
companies such as Virgin, Talktalk and Sky run ads which claim like £8 a month for ubercahunadogsbollocksbroadband, and if you're paying attention there's a smallprint flash at the bottom of the screen that indicates that this is on top of line rental at £15/mo and a phone number at £19/mo. Unfortunately for us, that flash is enough to get out of false advertising claims (which is why they did it, but still they push the ubercahunadogsbollocksbroadband deal).
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That is exactly because our government keeps deciding to let the market solve it even though our so-called markets don't have enough independent sellers for competition to have any effect. Each 'competitor' can easily match the very few others sleaze for sleaze so nobody goes out of business.
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That is exactly because our government keeps deciding to let the market solve it even though our so-called markets don't have enough independent sellers for competition to have any effect. Each 'competitor' can easily match the very few others sleaze for sleaze so nobody goes out of business.
Fraud isn't a part of a free market, and is a legitimate time for using courts to settle the dispute.
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No it isn't, but in a world of imperfect enforcement, *IF* there are enough legitimate competitors, the market may limit the damage. Alas, we have neither effective enforcement nor adequate markets.
Re: Good luck! (Score:2)
Re: Keep it classy (Score:2)