FCC slams Comcast with largest-ever fine for a cable company The US Federal Communications Commission is trumpeting the “largest civil penalty assessed from a cable operator” after it fined Comcast $2.3m for charging its customers for services they didn’t ask for and equipment they didn’t need. The government regulator said Comcast had shown a pattern of “negative option billing,” where …
This is a tax write-off for the business. Corporate malfeasance will not end until you go after the personal wallets of the decision makers. Fine the actual factual people responsible and junk like this will quickly stop. As it is now, the worst thing that can happen to anyone who green lighted such unethical actions is to be fired, sacked, let go. Hardly a deterrent.
Sure, its a tax writeoff, but so is giving your employees all a 20% raise. Just like the profits are higher by not giving everyone a fat raise, they will also be higher by not paying fines.
If it was a $2.3 billion fine instead of $2.3 million, believe me it would be a HUGE deterrent for them. But when the fines are so puny, it is like giving a multi-millionaire a $50 parking ticket. A guy making minimum wage might avoid ever parking in that spot again because $50 is real money for him, but a millionaire will happily pay that fine every day of the week if it saves him being late for a meeting.
All true.
2.3 million, basically nothing. God bless my United States of Business and its in your face greed....mmmmm. I would wonder why England seems to be making shifts to align closer to our "business model", but we were founded by the English. Whatever, we're 1st world capitalists with under world ethics.
P.S. I could be wrong about the US/England alignment (I really have no idea), but I don't care because either way it all seems to be turning to shit in both places.
By my calculations, Comcast lost several years of my business totaling about $10000 because they refused to give me the contract I wanted. They wanted me to pay all installation fees, all equipment fees, accept speeds as low as zero, and still be held to a massive early termination fee for 3 years. There must be one hell of a commission on that 3 year ETF.
Pennies for complaining. At $2.3 million spread over how many customers probably amounts to very little when it comes to actual customers, and the fine goes to the FCC who will keep it in their coffers to write rules that effect us all in ways they can't even imagine.
So, three hours sounds about right.
What should really happen is that every bill have a line item that indicates the fine paid in the form of a discount. In black and white for everyone to see. THAT might impress the management to do something (I have doubts).
Worse than pennies. They overcharged us about $1000 for a slew of TV contracts that we did not order. When we called them on it, we had to prove that we did *not* have the equipment. Lovely. As push came to shove, it turned out that the account who did order the services was overdue, so Comcast's installer could not active the devices and decided to slap them on the next nearest account. Ours :-(
To this day, we have not gotten all of our money back as somehow, the phone number attached to the account never matches what they have so the billing tentacle flatout refuses to talk. (But said phone number matches just fine if we want to add services, of course...)
The problem is not the FCC really. If you research the judgment, I bet you will find the FCC is fining Comcast pretty close to the statutory maximum, which if you dig deeper has probably not been raised by Congess since the 70s or 80s.
If the FCC tried to get more out of Comcast, they'd be hauled into court. There they would be told that they lacked the statutory authority to levy a larger fine, and the amount would get knocked back to where it is now.
i.e. figuring out another game to play with the billing - data caps, a fee for not paying online, variable rate pricing so that data costs more at "peak" times, etc etc, OK, I'll get not coat - it's the one with the laser burnt hole in it's pockets.
This will change nothing.
... is a bit like pissing over the rail into the wind. Feeling the back-scatter of love, yet?
Accept the simple fact that the corporations have captured the government (name yer nation; most are using the same playbook) and Comcast's little "slap on the wrist" by the FCC is really nothing more than a reminder to them to "Please! Don't be so effing OBVIOUS while screwing your customer base! It's embarrassing, and it needlessly upsets the masses!"
So Comcast will soothe us, the disenfranchised masses, with soporific assurances while continuing to ream our backsides with their monopoly-empowered flim-flam finger. Sometimes I feel we are the pre-Revolution French, and it's still early days.
"But as we move to ever-higher content resolutions and massive VR and AR games that hog bandwidth"
Why on Earth would VR and AT games hog bandwidth? The reason games are so big these days is mainly because they have lots of high resolution textures, plus lots of video and sound. VR games don't use any more of that than any other game so would not be any bigger (and most currently use rather simple, stylised graphics and are therefore smaller), while AR games usually overlay fairly sparse graphics over a live image of the real world and are therefore actually much smaller than a normal game.
To put things in context, it's just been announced that the next Call of Duty game will be a 130GB download. Pokemon Go is 74 MB. And while both will require additional data to be transferred to and from servers during use, that's not even going to be GBs since it obviously doesn't involve the big things like textures (assuming they're not totally incompetent of course, you could probably manage that if you had to download all the art every time you found a Pokemon).
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