A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
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.
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
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.
Oml thats actually insane and incredible. My goodness wow
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.
I’d love to have a local option. We get spectrum or wind stream, which means spectrum. They charge whatever they want because they have a pseudo monopoly.
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.
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.
"We don't know what they are until we charge you."
Boohoo Comcast. Hopefully the FCC tells them to get wrecked.
If the FCC is anything like the SEC/DOJ I wouldn't hold my breath. All of these regulatory agencies are regulatory captured via the revolving door.
Man do I ever get sick of corpo bullshit
Too hard to disclose fees but easy to charge them huh
That's some straight up gaslighting shit. If they can figure out to charge it, they can print it on a bill.
Typical corporate lawyer speak.
Can't wait to try this during tax season next year
lol, my thoughts exactly
It's a simple solution, Comcast. Don't charge any fee you aren't willing to spend the effort to disclose.
If it is too hard/difficult for a company to itemize all their fees, they are charging way too many fees.
Funny, it was never too hard when they billed me.
That headline is some NotTheOnion material.
Ooh does that community exist here? Forgot about it!
Comcast: "But I am le tired."
(This reference goes back a few years, kids!)
Oh god now I feel both nostalgic and old at the same time.
I thought the end of the world and "I JUST WANT BANG BANG BANG" was the funniest shit ever back then.
Blast from the past woooow
I'm so glad I don't have to use Comcast any more. A small local ISP (Sonic) expanded to cover my area last year and offers 10Gbps symmetric fiber for $40/month - half the price I was paying Comcast for 1.2Gbps down / 35Mbps up.
I'm super jealous. At least I'm moving to a new apartment with fiber from CenturyLink at it, but even they are running $70/mo for gigabit. I'm living the T-Mobile 5G home internet life right now because CL only has DSL at my current place, and fuck Comcast in general.
They need to do a reset of their pricing them. Figure it out again from the ground up.
I pay exactly what my isp advertises never a cent more.
I live in a third world country.
So do they
Comcast is a truly rotten company. Like without fail they continue to impress me on their new clever ways of misleading customers. Like remember "10G" from earlier this year...?
"The label hasn't even reached consumers yet, but Comcast is already trying to create loopholes." Is anyone surprised? I'm not a huge fan of Google's privacy practices, but their Fiber service is outstandingly easy to use and fast. I'm lucky to live in Kansas City though...
I wish Google fiber were in more states.
Nonono it's easy to charge you, it's just hard to disclose it. Duh
They will just have to create a fee to "cover the costs" of having to tell you what they are going to charge you.
I think comcast getting fucked by regulators forcing fee disclosure has the potential to make a lot of people 'too hard'
I think that's the point?
Nonono it's simple when we bill you, just too hard to list it upfront.
There's an easy fix, just don't allow charging any fees that aren't listed along with the advertised price. See? Very simple. They'll figure out how to list them thereafter, believe in them.
But according to Comcast, "two aspects of the Commission's Order impose significant administrative burdens and unnecessary complexity in complying with the broadband label requirements."
"We much prefer to impose significant financial burdens and unnecessary complexities on our ~~victims~~ customers."
poor comcast. gotta feel so sorry for them /s
Have they tried…not being corpo sleaze?
