FCC bans cable TV industry’s favorite trick for hiding full cost of service

Wilshire@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 624 points –
FCC bans cable TV industry’s favorite trick for hiding full cost of service
arstechnica.com
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Quick! Someone tell us why this isn't a good thing because the government did it! Surely there's some secret corruption at work!

Whatever it is It will only come down to costing companies with deep lobby pockets money and how the conservative new agencies are spinning it.

I'd like to see everything priced on the rim and out the door. Taxes, registration, fees, shipping all on the line. I'd like the price on the shelf/invoice/website/advertisement/cash register and bank statement to all match.

I'm gonna call out the way Amazon bills your credit card for multi-item orders on this one. That's some fuckery right there.

What do they do?

They charge your card for seemingly random groups of products so your order is split into strange Unrecognizable transaction amounts, and you can't tell by looking them which order items the charges are for, and if your want to see, it's buried deep in your account settings.

And then once a month they randomly sign you up for Prime "by mistake". But don't worry, since you caught it in time you'll get a full refund in 5-7 business days.

The lobbying group for cable companies said that it would hurt their highly competitive market(I'm sure they weren't able to type that without laughing) and it makes it harder for them to advertise one price since the cost of the sports and local bundles are regional (though they have no problems getting those prices correct on the bills.)

Umm uhhhh they'll have to increase the total price to make up the difference in processing more numbers which will cause the employee budget to decrease hurting the local economy which means less taxes to fund fire department and your babies will burn in a fire caused by the unqualified cable tech they had to hire to offset the loss in profits.

No no no, you got all wrong. Think of the children! They are ruining the future of our children!

I just want the unqualified cable tech to not snip the cable to my antenna while he's in my backyard.

Only complaint I have is they waited till the shit is dying to step in and do something. But hey, still a win yo

Usually here it's not a good thing because nothing is allowed to be good. Was the same on a lot of Reddit, too. Like, the upliftingnews subreddit comments were the worst for it.

"Child spends weekends collecting cans from the trash to save enough money to turn off the Orphan Crushing Machine for a day" is not uplifting news, and is most of what got posted there.

Somewhat true, but there were a lot of genuinely good "new development will do X" or "Millionaire sets up foundation for Y". Those invariably were filled with top comments about "sure this will make food more affordable in X, but what about (mostly or totally unrelated bad thing)??" or "this is a step in the right direction, but it doesn't immediately solve all problems!!", which were exhausting and useless. For a whole bunch of people, Nothing Can Ever Be Good.

You know, like a bunch of comments in this thread.