A Close Look At Your Bills' 'Fine Print'

[bfdd]

http://www.npr.org/2012/09/20/161477162/a-close-look-at-your-bills-fine-print

"We're way behind countries like Lithuania, Ukraine and Moldavia. Per bit of information moved, we pay 38 times what the Japanese pay," Johnston tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies. "If you buy one of these triple-play packages that are heavily advertised — where you get Internet, telephone and cable TV together — typically you'll pay what I pay, about $160 a month including fees. The same service in France is $38 a month."

In his new book, The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use "Plain English" to Rob You Blind, Johnston examines the fees that companies — such as cellphone and cable — have added over the years that have made bills incrementally larger.

Johnston says that telephone and cable companies worked the regulatory process and the legislatures and Congress to get the rules written for their benefit.

"Over the last 20 years, we've paid at least $360 billion in higher rates to the traditional telephone companies, and well north of $100 billion more to the cable companies, who all testified before Congress, made filings with regulatory agencies, bought ads on TV that told us we were going to have this information superhighway and it was going to be everywhere," he says. "Instead, what they built was a system in very limited locations."

I'll probably be buying this book, but it's amazing how we've been swindled for so much money and that our legislators and regulators have been allowed to sell us all out. We need to stop supporting these companies and we need to start fighting tooth and nail against all of the regulation they've paid for that allows the swindling to continue.

 

[wirednuts]

i think people were aware of this in the 80's when cable service they paid for started showing ads. the whole point of buying cable was to get rid of ads. then, suddenly there is ads and because the whole system is a monopoly there wasnt anything anyone could do about it.

support online alternatives. pay for services that offer real value, and if you dont like ads then support the services that dont have them- like netflix.

 

[ElFenix]

i think people were aware of this in the 80's when cable service they paid for started showing ads. the whole point of buying cable was to get rid of ads. then, suddenly there is ads and because the whole system is a monopoly there wasnt anything anyone could do about it.

support online alternatives. pay for services that offer real value, and if you dont like ads then support the services that dont have them- like netflix.

eh? cable started as a way to get service in areas with poor reception.

 

[DrPizza]

eh? cable started as a way to get service in areas with poor reception.

Huh? Areas with poor reception STILL don't have cable 30 years later.

 

[wirednuts]

eh? cable started as a way to get service in areas with poor reception.

yeah thats not it. it was to offer premium content, more channels and no commercials.

 

[bfdd]

Huh? Areas with poor reception STILL don't have cable 30 years later.

They've been to busy posting record profits, takes a lot of work to design those power points and excel documents. How could we possibly expect them to actually spend the money we've been paying them on the things they said would and should be spending the money on?