The reason government is corrupt is because we want it to be corrupt. If it weren't corrupt, nobody would pick this endless shower of dynastic creeps.
There is no good democratic outcome for $175K a year jobs that cost half a billion dollars to apply for.
I would argue that this is a reason to reform our electoral system rather than just resign ourselves to a corrupt system. If it didn’t cost half a billion dollars to become a politician and the pay better reflected the job responsibilities (along with other reforms) we’d probably see less corruption
Politicians hate electoral reform.
The reason government is corrupt is because it is corrupt, and corrupt governments don't give their citizens an option for "stop being corrupt" in the ballot.
PACs were limited lobbying.
That wasn't good enough...so we got super PACs with virtually no oversight what-so-ever.
In most cases, a vote that ends regulatory bodies and enables businesses to dump toxic sludge in your drinking water costs a couple grand.
It’s actually embarrassing how cheap votes are.
Granted, these deals are often backended and include a job promise down the road or some similar under-the-table stuff (jobs for relatives, etc), but I'm continually shocked by how cheap our legislators are. You'd think if a legislator knows a corporation is poised to make several billion dollars if a piece of legislation is passed, the legislator should demand a lot higher than $10k.
This isn't how we do legal policy. We wouldn't say "all bribery laws are gone, we'll just make sure that we don't have any politicians that accept bribes some other way."
There are things that could be done but the people in office making the laws are not interested, and the population is too apathetic/indoctrinated to make the correct choices.
It doesn't mean paying politicians.
Lobbying is simply that - petitioning your representative for change (or no change). No money changes hands, you literally just get time with your representative to argue your case.
When a company spends $1M on lobbying, it's $1M given to a lobbying firm to put together a strategy and a pitch to representatives.
If you want fund raising laws to change, then say that.
I think many people are aware of what lobbying means. They're just using standard motte-and-bailey tactics to make it seem like they're defending something innocuous (petitioning the government) while they're really defending bribery and corruption.
The Strategy: Hey $senator, wouldn't you like $500,000 donated to your re-election campaign? Of course, we would need to know that you share our commitment to Clean Coal!
(I assume the lobbyists themselves get to pocket their share of the $1M, but don't know what the markup is on bribes)
I mean, EFF uses fundraising to lobby the government for privacy protection. Should we ban that?
• Entities which receive more than half their funding from any non-human "persons" (corporations, other legal entities) or where more than 50% of the funding comes from the top 500 donors, or who have fewer than 10,000 unique donors (in the past 4 years) overall, cannot provide any funds to any candidate's campaign, nor run ads mentioning, hinting, or suggesting any candidate or party, nor any other BS shenanigans astroturfing PACs legally do today.
• The rest of the entities who don't fall under the above, still cannot make contributions, but can run ads, assuming the ad starts and ends with the phrase "(TRUE LEGAL NAME OF ORG) [supports/opposes] (name of politician, bill, or ballot measure)"
Politicians taking meetings and listening to ideas based on who is paying for their (re-)election campaigns is corruption. They don't represent corporations, they represent all of the people in their state or district. When they take a meeting from a campaign donor, they are saying that only wealthy people's voices matter to them. It's corruption. Legal and yet still morally depraved.
Though perhaps lobbying (as practiced or in general) should still be considered inappropriate.
This is true but when people are talking about restricting lobbying the kind of lobbying they want to restrict isn’t companies saying “hey this policy isn’t good for us”. It’s companies spending millions of dollars on donations and advertising to force politicians to make laws that benefit them. It’s possible to restrict the second kind without impacting the first kind, for example by implementing spending limits.
Aren’t the rules on donations made by companies pretty restricted in the US? Isn’t it normally that companies persuade their employees to give to some company pac (as a deduction from their paycheck) and that pac then makes maximum campaign contributions to various politicians. (The limits on both contributions to the pac and to campaigns are pretty small. On the order of $5k. It seems unlikely to matter much to a politician but maybe they do care).
Maybe you’re not talking about the US or maybe I’m wrong or there is some other mechanism I don’t understand
They aren't forcing. They'd just rather take the money than not. If politicians weren't corrupt, we'd only have the first kind of lobbying, as no one will spend money on something that doesn't work.
> Even ignoring lobbying, you see regulators reaching out for comments from industry about new rules.
Yet somehow the only times those "comments from industry" are taken into consideration in a meaningful way is when they come from large businesses with deep pockets or astroturf consumer interest groups funded by large businesses with deep pockets. Genuine grassroots consumer interest groups rarely leave a mark.
Corporations have always been legal persons, going back to the Middle Ages (guilds, chartered cities, universities) and even Ancient Rome:
Opinions and precedents vary:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person#Rights_and_respon...
No where in that article does it cite a jurisdiction where a non-human legal entity has the same rights and responsibilities as a human. My point still stands that a human has a different, albeit overlapping, set of rights and responsibilities in comparison to other legal entities.
Who else besides people would control a monopoly?
I wish Google was able to achieve this with their GrandCentral acquisition, but as usual they Google let their acquisition wither away.
I agree disruption in the space would be great, but don't let Amazon enter the ISP space. They have enough money, and power over the internet, as is.
I would have to think that would be an antitrust violation anyway.
I know this is close to whataboutism so I will try to choose my words carefully, but does Amazon really have that much power over the Internet? Realistically Amazon does not have a large advert network, footing in mobile, operating systems or web browsers?
They have some control in the form of AWS/Route 53 but that's a far cry from some larger DNS, domain registrar and CDN providers.
Not denying that they have a lot of money, but even when using that money to try and buy a user base (Alexa or Fire Tablet/TV) their success has been pretty limited overall.
Any new entrant can only increase competition and drive down prices.
Amazon as an ISP would be amazing for me. There's only one ISP that serves my neighborhood already, so any additional one would be a godsend.
If it's between no new ISP and a new Amazon ISP, I'll take Amazon any day of the week.
You should look at all these fees on your ISP bill and get pissed off. The issue here is that the taxing body's ploy worked: you got pissed at Comcast and AT&T instead of them.
The same argument goes for including the sale tax or many gas taxes in the displayed price, (or displaying the price including VAT in EU).
FTR, I do get that by listing the tax explicitly you get to appreciate your local tax is lower than your neighbor's or get annoyed that it's higher (and then vote to change that).
My internet provider in Poland offered me the internet service for 60PLN/mo. Guess how much I'm paying for it? 60PLN/mo. They obviously pay many taxes and fees to different organizations but I don't need to care about it.
(Tangent: the above is discussing consumer-targeted prices only. Business-targeted prices often don’t include VAT in the advertised price, even in the EU, because most EU business can get a credit for VAT paid on inputs to a product or service in which they themselves charge VAT. Of course, receipts and invoices still break down all the details of which VAT rate is charged for which item, and sometimes why.)
The situation for disclosure of multiple overlapping sales taxes in the US (as is usually the case in NYC for example) is much less detailed, sadly, but even there it’s still usually clear which items are taxed or tax-free.
Very much a fan of the EU's Consumer Rights Directive, especially where it pertains to advertised prices. Even if some things have now skirted it, like sugar-tax and pfand in certain countries.
In my country at least, any business with a VAT number buys most things VAT-free and the end consumer is charged the whole amount, for the sake of doing less paperwork. Don't know how exactly it works when something is transformed into a lower-VAT output.
Mexico, like Europe, does include the VAT in prices advertised to consumers. That part of my comment was accurate.
As for Pfand (bottle deposit), that’s an interesting case. At least in Germany, they usually have to advertise the Pfand amount and list it individually on the receipt. But also, it’s similar to the situation businesses have with VAT: both for cultural reasons and due to the sums of money involved, it’s quite common for Germans to actually bother with returning bottles for the Pfand, so the extra cost effectively gets rebated for most purchases subject to Pfand. The whole system and the underlying psychological incentives would not work as well if the Pfand cost were more hidden than it is.
Aren’t there stories in the news regularly about ISPs adding additional “fuck you” fees just because they can? So this does not seem to be working. At the end of the day, when I buy a beer I don’t care that €0.20 is going to their administrative overhead and €1.28 to their installations’ maintenance. That is not supposed to be the customer’s problem.
> and two, so that customers who want to lobby their elected officials to reduce or eliminate any of the charges can identify the specific charges applicable and each of their amounts, without which no meaningful political activism is possible.
This does not seem to be working well either. And at the same time, other countries without this issue seem to be doing fine with their broadband prices. It looks very ridiculous from the outside, in any case.
Yes they do sometimes add their own fees like you say. But those are usually clear flat amounts per line per month, so calculation of that is easy enough. It’s still worthwhile for customers to be able to catch accidental or intentional overcharges versus their published fee schedule, since that ability is part of what keeps companies relatively diligent and honest in this area. Widespread mistakes can and do lead to class action lawsuits or easy boilerplate individual arbitrations or government investigations, in the US.
Additionally, some customers qualify for exemptions or reductions for certain governmentally imposed fees. Transparency as to what is being charged is important to make it easy to notice whether this kind of exemption is or isn’t being applied.
I think I got an offer like this from Sonic on the Bay Area. They would eat up all fees exceeding the declared maximum. (Or I'm making this up, was in 2018)
You should look at all these fees on your ISP bill and get pissed off.
You're right, we should be pissed at Comcast and AT&T fraudulently misrepresenting the cost of service. They chose to pass these fees along (conveniently marked up for their "costs" associated with administering this fee to their customers) and are pretending that they don't have a choice.
The thing is, "service fees" aren't government-imposed. They're fees entirely made up by Comcast and AT&T for the privilege of providing the service that the customer is already paying them for. Since they're not optional, they can and should be rolled into the advertised price.
Most consumers aren't going to care that a portion of the price is Comcast structuring prices so that it can cover mandated costs of doing business. I've never encountered a company listing, say, that it's charging additional pennies so that it can meet its Social Security tax obligations, for example. That level of granularity simply isn't that interesting for consumer-level prices.
If Comcast thinks these fees are unreasonable and wants to lobby voters and politicians to work against them, it is free to do so via other means.
The point is that the fees are charged to the ISPs, and then the ISPs want to pass it onto the consumer but not actually say that that's what is going on.
Yes, some localities will charge more things. Hell, listing them out would add pressure to make these fees go away! The FCC isn't the one imposing these fees. But ISPs are choosing to charge the users, but also not advertising these fees ahead of time! Advertising "this service costs X" but actually costing X + Y is something that feels pretty unambiguously bad.
Then again the US is the land of "every locality sets its own sales tax" so....
I get what you're saying about the fee being for the consumer. It's just like... OK then, well tell the consumer how much they are going to pay. You mentioned that the lobbying is to get rid of these locality's taxes, and I'm not pro-federalism so hey why not.
But all of these places have to collect the money anyways, so there is _a_ logic to how much to charge. Many places in the world, the price of internet is "type your zip code into a box and then we tell you". This seems eminently reasonable. This precludes a nationwide campaign to say exactly how much the service costs (unless ISPs just decided to eat the costs themselves!). But wouldn't it be good for people to know how much something costs?
It was very weird going to a restaurant for the first time and paying the price listed on the menu, and not 30% more (sales tax + tip)
You can buy New Zealand produce around the world for less than it costs us in New Zealand. So going for a meal costs what it says on the menu and no more, but that cost is steep.
Isn't it mostly just economies of scale plus transport costs?
Or are our industrial relations laws really not as good?
Discussion on the European system for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy#Ove...
https://simplenewzealand.com/cost-of-living-in-new-zealand-v....
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/money/2021/09/shopper-s-recei...
https://thespinoff.co.nz/money/12-08-2021/how-do-nz-grocery-...
Japan is better: there's absolutely no tipping, at all. The price you see advertised is the price you pay, and they won't even take your tip. (There are a few exceptions: some American-style cafes have been putting tipping jars at the register; very annoying.) The only caveat is the tax: that's not always counted in the price, so many restaurants show two prices, the pre-tax price and the post-tax price just below it (usually in a smaller font).
The other thing that's MUCH better about Japan vs. Europe is that water is free. In Europe, if you want any drink with your meal at all, you have to ask for it, and if you ask for water, they'll bring a fancy glass bottle of very expensive bottled water. If you ask for tap water they'll give you dirty looks. In Japan, it's more like America: water (tap water, but it's really good) is free, and usually given without asking. Some places put a giant carafe of iced water on your table, which is great during this ridiculously hot summer.
The other thing that's much better about Japan (this isn't really about restaurants, though it does apply to the food court restaurants in malls) is that public bathrooms are free. In Europe, they usually expect you to leave a tip or some kind of fee for the cleaning people. Japan is again more like America: public bathrooms are just that: open to the public, for free. The big differences are that 1) there's a washlet on most toilets, and 2) they're actually clean.
Also, aforementioned aid doesn't have to be free, the person benefiting from your aid owes you the cost of that aid.
"Geld" is not gold, its money. "Gold" is gold.
But at least public toilets tend to be free whereas I believe in Sweden these tend to cost money.
Sure, you can say that you aren't "required" to tip in these cases, or that they're taking advantage of tourists who don't know better, but still, they're asking for a tip. To me, "no tipping culture" means that tipping simply does not exist. Europe has a tipping culture; it's just different than the US's.
I haven't seen it in this form in France (yet?). But I do see more and more payment terminals that are asking for a tip when they're presented to you. The amounts usually seem fixed, and you have the option of picking 0. I've mostly seen this in bars and similar situations.
Some stores may also ask you to "round up" to give to some charity. Fun fact: these didn't use to work with Apple Pay, so if you said yes, the assistant would have to cancel and restart the payment process.
No, it’s not. Europe is more than one country, and there are local differences. And even in several places where it is common, nobody is going to be upset if you don’t tip, because they have their salary regardless.
> The other thing that's MUCH better about Japan vs. Europe is that water is free. In Europe, if you want any drink with your meal at all, you have to ask for it, and if you ask for water, they'll bring a fancy glass bottle of very expensive bottled water.
Depends on the country, I assume, but in most of those I know they are happy to bring you some tap water. In France, they are required by law to offer tap water for free but IIRC that’s not the case in the Netherlands or Germany, for example. So generalisations are not helpful.
I find it very annoying that even have to ask. Especially when in many places they'd just bring you a €3-4 tiny glass bottle (which IMHO might be the most idiotic consumer product to ever exist) if you just asked for water.
You have to explicitly ask for tap, which is just awkward so way to often I just end up ordering a beer.. which is not ideal either.
To be fair that's also the case in New York, California and some other states (and minimum wage in these states is higher than in pretty much any European country).
It's not exactly common. In Belgium, the behavior is like when they thought it's really good or if people worked on a restaurant before.
But nobody expects that anyone would tip.
Last time I went to Hungary it was added to the bill though
Ps. A bottle of water is free in France and some other places.
Giving 50 cent for a restaurant when only using the bathroom is just a sign of good behavior in my view. Depends if I'm hurried, but I'll usually buy a glass of water. Then I'm a customer ;)
Why? If you're already eating there, why should you pay to use the toilet? And if you're not eating there, then why are you there to use the toilet? Just use a public one. If there aren't sufficient public toilets, that sounds like a failure of the municipal government. Any good city should have lots of public toilets outside, in train stations, or in large shared buildings.
Also, my experience in Germany at a mall food court is that they DO charge you to use the toilet there, even though I was eating there.
If there even are public toilets, if they are open, if they are in a state to be used (and not just an uncleaned mess), if they are free... plenty of reasons to go to a restaurant to use their toilet.
Which might be also paid (assuming they even exist)
I'm not sure I'd say either of those chargeable toilet scenarios is well correlated to clean toilets, but I assume mostly they do that to try to avoid various kinds of mischief.
https://switcher.ie/broadband/ireland/dublin/?eircode=&tv_in...
In Cincinnati, the Cr^H^HTime-Warner Cable rate rose every month of every year for as long as you remained a customer. Complaining would get you a story about it being a "billing mistake" and "a credit on your next bill". The credit usually didn't arrive unless you complained again. And even then they might randomly switch tactics to "We're so sorry. We'll give you [1 | 3] months of [HBO | Showtime | Starz | all premium channels.".
I'm still wary of comparing charges across metros. /-:
It’s one thing to have a monopoly and gouge your customers if the product you are providing is unimpeachable but they are far from that.
In France, if you look at your EDF (national electricity company) invoice, you'll see that you pay VAT (a tax) on top of other taxes.
They also levy VAT on the "Greffier"'s fees. That's a clerk at the "commerce tribunal", which is basically a part of the state administration with which you interact whenever you need any administrative changes for a company. Say, you need to declare a change of address.
They don't advertise prices such that you can take the advertised fixed fee, add your consumption times the advertised kWh price, and have your final amount due. No, they add a "tax on energy consumption", a "contribution to the public electricity service", and a "contribution to electricity delivery". And, on all of these, they levy the VAT.
> they would just recalculate the base fees accordingly
And I think this willingly done, to give the impression that taxes are lower than they really are. Which makes the whole thing seem dishonest.
Very much this. The law should be that you must advertise the price you will charge, full stop. Same goes with tipping mess. Just compute the total price internally and tell me what it is. Nothing additional allowed.
I would have gladly paid $62/mo for gigabit speeds but i felt like i was overpaying them by $22 because of their ads.
Marketing were tasked with always increasing revenue, so they would often sit around with their feet on the table while they came up with such brilliant fees as "you downgraded your internet plan? Fee" & "You want more data on your cellphone plan? Fee."
It was sickening, but also very enlightening to realize it really was all made up.
Let's make this imaginary restaurant more fun: not only is it required to charge a per-seating fee, but it's not the same fee for each customer. Instead, they have to inquire about the residential address of each guest, and compute a locality-specific seating fee.
If my bill looks like this:
$50 Steak Meal
$10.54 Municipal We Hate You tax
$5.87 Local ditch digging tax
$2.15 State paperwork shredding tax
$0.04 Federal fuck you tax
Why can't instead the restaurant just write on the menu:
$70 Steak ($50 + taxes and fees)
...and eat the costs itself? It's entirely within the businesses' power to do this. They choose not to.
The ISPs are asking, explicitly, to be allowed to quote a "maximum possible" price inclusive all fees, non-itemized, like you suggest.
> No, they can't --- the fees are different in neighboring municipalities.
So? Who cares? Why do I need to know this as a consumer? I'm sure a McDonald's in the city pays higher rents than one in the country, yet both will sell me a coke for $1 without ever making me think about that fact.
> There isn't one single all-in rate they can charge everybody who walks in the door, which is the whole problem they're complaining about.
If the current pricing for a 100mbps Internet plan is $40 + $1 (local tax) in one town and $40 + $3 (local tax) in the next town over, the ISP is welcome to just create one label for that plan at a $42 price point (with no enumerated taxes/fees shown at all) and abstract away the computation/remittance of those taxes internally. Call it $45 to really play it safe. Sucks for the people in the lower-tax town, but this solves the problem the ISPs are crying about.
Can you please explain what you meant by this?
This was the contract they accepted when they eagerly signed such a deal, because the last thing those companies want is to have a bunch of little fiber outfits going around wiring up all the richest and easiest-to-deploy neighborhoods with quality fiber internet service. Or -- g-d forbid -- municipalities cutting them out and laying fiber themselves. Their franchise fee protects them from either of those horrors.
Pretending they're the victim for covering the costs they agreed to, and then acting like consumers are being unreasonable when we don't pay what was forced on us by our one choice of ISP is the boldest hypocrite move I've heard of yet from telcos.
Go look yours up. I just did, to make sure (I have opinions on this weird issue because I'm on my town's governing commission for this stuff --- go join yours too, I've gotten to do all sorts of cool stuff that I wouldn't have predicted from the nerdy charter of the commission --- and after 18 months of falling asleep every time the topic of the franchise agreement came up, I finally stayed awake and learned we were making a fairly huge amount of money by soaking residents for their ISP connections).
If they were actually taxes Comcast wouldn’t be fighting this rule, which does not apply to government mandated taxes.
I can't get broadband at my home despite being less than a mile from multiple providers in 3 different directions. I literally have an att fiber running down my row to a neighborhood less than a mile a way.
After being pissed at att for several years I finally looked into it and realized the county won't approve att putting in the service for anything but developer projects. Basically crony capitalism...
Franchise fees are fees paid by an ISP for the right to provide their service in a territory; paying the franchise fee entitles the ISP to access the public right of way (such as by installing lines under roads, in sewers, etc.). That they happen to commonly be calculated as a % of gross charges paid by ISP customers is irrelevant; royalties are calculated the same way and nobody calls a royalty a tax.
> a compulsory contribution to state revenue, levied by the government on workers' income and business profits, or added to the cost of some goods, services, and transactions.
If it's both an essential service and effectively impossible to implement without making use of public land (and I don't disagree), then there's no reasonable basis for it to be a private industry operation at all. These ISPs can't have it both ways.
Streets cut cities into small islands of private lands. Therefore, you cannot reach anyone without crossing the public right of way.
And on that note...my ISP (Starry) does exactly that. They don't use the public rights of way so they don't have to charge many of the franchise fees that Comcast et al do.
Yes, I’d call it a sales tax, property tax, income tax, etc. based on what it was grounded in.
A bill isn't a tax just because it's a bill from the government.
If they are not charging you for the TV service then why are you complaining about ads? Complain about paying for ads, not getting an ad supported service for free.
Except no additional cost sidestepped the monthly surcharges and taxes that ended up on the bill anyway.
This literally sounds like fraud to me. If I did that, i think i would get charged
From the NCTA's Ex Parte filing: they're objecting to reporting requirements for pass-through fees from federal, state, and local governments. Importantly, none of these are fees ISPs "can" charge; they're taxes that public bodies collect through the ISP's billing system. In some cases, those "fees" are added by statutory mandate; in others, they're a condition of access to municipal last-mile infrastructure (as is the case with franchise fees).
I generally think most middle-class people aren't taxed enough (yell at me somewhere else about this). But these taxes are frustrating. They're hidden on ISP bills, so you can't easily tell that they represent your local municipality milking you for fee revenue. And they're not even consistent; for instance, because Comcast runs copper television service, they've got a different history with many municipalities and different contract stipulations. In other words: your local government can tax you specifically for using (or not using) Comcast. That's messed up.
It should be the responsibility of public bodies that levy fees to make sure that people are made aware of the nature of those fees. The ISPs aren't responsible for this stuff, and shouldn't be asked to do more work to further conceal decisions our elected officials are making for us.
What are your thoughts on businesses incorporating and listing the amount of sales tax paid on receipts of transactions at your local grocery/convenience store?
It appears to me that the least surprising place for these things to be listed is where it is most relevant, which is alongside the primary transaction presented as an invoice or receipt. How would you improve on this UX assuming that the fee is definitely going to be incorporated into the cost?
> I generally think most middle-class people aren't taxed enough (yell at me somewhere else about this)
I'll refrain from yelling. Can you expound on this since you thought to mention it?
Sure every government body could make their own website listing telecom fees and then I'd have to go to at least 3 (local, state, federal) to figure out how much I'd be paying or the ISP could tell me since they already aggregate that info.
I do. If they are obligated to collect it, they ought to be obligated to inform the customer at the time of purchase. It's unreasonable to expect customers to agree to vague terms that leave them not knowing how much they are going to pay.
If I go shopping online, I know how much I'm going to pay in shipping and sales tax before I agree to the charge. This doesn't seem that different to me. The ISP knows how much they are going to charge. They just don't want to tell their customers until it's too late. I'll blame 'em for it all day long, it's their fault they don't want to tell me up front, not my government's.
A common anti-poor talking point is that poor people don't make and stick to budgets, but corporate refusal to include tax in prices means that you can't reasonably tell how a given purchase will affect your budget beforehand. A simple trip to the grocery store means that you have to know what taxes apply to every item in your cart before you go to checkout to be able to know how much you're spending. That's not reasonable for the average consumer. If you really think it is, go ahead and try calculating your total of 20+ different grocery store items before you check out--you'll fail.
If an ISP collects these fees and taxes, it's their obligation to inform the customer about them and to include them in price listings, at least in addition to the raw price. For example in Germany b2b price listings will often exclude VAT (which means VAT will still be shown but not included in the listed item price) but for b2c prices will always match exactly what you pay. The only example I've ever seen of a "surprise tax" in my entire life both in private and professionally is artists' social security insurance contributions, which are owed by any business or organisation paying a contractor or employee defined as an "artist or editor" (which includes most creative and media work): the fee is not collected by the person you pay but has to be paid to the social security organization directly and it's something you're simply expected to know if you run a business or organization.
This is false. The ex parte filing itself clearly states that these passed-thru fees are not taxes and that part of the burden ISPs are trying to avoid is having to break out these fees the way they already are required to break out taxes.
The truly bizarre thing is that the ISPs already have the breakdown of these fees available to them when they create the bill. They're actually doing more work to obfuscate this information by summing those amounts together.
The ISPs aren't responsible for this stuff, and shouldn't be asked to do more work to further conceal decisions our elected officials are making for us.
But that's exactly what ISPs are trying to do. If you truly understood what you appear to be arguing for (accountability for elected officials), you should be in favor of requiring ISPs to break out these fees separately...because then customers would be able to see exactly what fees are making their bills so large.
The only reason ISPs don't want to do this is because they impose their own, wholly-made up "service fees" and include this in the fee amount they "pass along" to the customers. If they had to break out fees separately, it would be immediately apparent that government-imposed fees are a substantially smaller portion of the bill than ISPs (and their sycophants) claim.
I understand that your conservative ideology prevents you from understanding that governments can impose charges on businesses that are not taxes. But on that note, welcome to the world of capitalism. Governments are market participants too now. And as previously stated, these franchise fees are charged to ISPs in exchange for them getting the right to utilize public rights of way. It's not a tax because it's a business transaction: money in exchange for access. ISPs are free not to pay these franchise fee, and in exchange for not paying the free jurisdictions are free to deny them access to the public rights of way.
Each dollar in that line item literally offsets a dollar of property tax levy
This is false. In 99.99999% of American municipal budgets, property tax levies are separate from fees levied on businesses. They are independent pools of revenue that don't offset each other. Perhaps you live in the rare business-hostile jurisdiction where business fees offset property tax revenue? (On the tax front, red states are actually phenomenally hostile to businesses; what they don't charge in income taxes they more than make up for through a variety of other taxes and fees on businesses. My employer, for example, pays almost as much to Alabama for "other business taxes" as we do to California or NY, where we have several times the revenue and actual physical nexus, for income and business taxes collectively.)
you'll see a line item for the revenue collected from these fees,
Yes, of course fees are characterized as revenue. It's basic accounting. What else would they be characterized as? Funny Money?
Here's a newsflash: the service fees on your internet bill are also revenue to Comcast, both the pass-thru fees and the additional made-up service fees that Comcast adds to pad the bills. And again, those made-up fees are the reason that Comcast and AT&T are opposing this mandate, because it would reveal that the "service fee" charge on your ISP bill is mostly a made-up service fee imposed by your ISP and not imposed by your local government.
I don't have to care about this distinction
People who proudly proclaim their ignorance are the ones least suited for being involved in local government, especially when those distinctions are fundamental to an issue they're arguing about.
Consider: what incentive do ISPs have to hide municipal taxes? Why would they do that? Wouldn't it behoove them to advertise these taxes to consumers so that consumers know it's not them adding this cost? There's obviously going to be very little cost simply reporting these taxes given they already have to calculate them to pay them.
The obvious answer is that, maybe this happens occasionally, but the majority of these fees aren't what you're describing: this is just a foil that ISPs are using to cover up their own greed.
> It should be the responsibility of public bodies that levy fees to make sure that people are made aware of the nature of those fees. The ISPs aren't responsible for this stuff, and shouldn't be asked to do more work to further conceal decisions our elected officials are making for us.
How does this make sense, given that ISPs are lobbying to be allowed to continue concealing these supposed decisions?
Likewise on every price increase my German electricity provider gives me a listing of each fee and tax that goes into the price. This is routinely used to point out "hey, we're not being greedy, most of this actually goes to your government so maybe deregulating us would save you money, wink-wink, nudge-nudge". If e.g. Comcast thinks its taxation is particularly punishing and anti-competitive, increasing transparency about this would actually help make their argument for them. That they still prefer to be intransparent and pretend this is unreasonably difficult when they literally have to do all the same accounting internally anyway suggests the intransparency is giving them an advantage.
Sick of these TelCos getting billions in subsidies, not spending it on infrastructure as promised (somehow they are allowed to act as a for-profit corporation!?), lobbying to get more taxpayer money, and then whining when we find out that half the fees on the bills they send out are just to pad profits. Greedy bastards, the lot of them. Time to cut the crap and just regulate them as utilities.