If I understand what you're saying correctly, I think the Junk Fee Prevention Act, which Joe Biden championed in this last SOTU address, is being marketed as doing this, more or less.

Exactly my thought. This problem wouldn’t have existed if the ISPs didn’t for decades advertise a plan for $50 and then charge $100 by adding on items like “just because we can fee” and “fee for processing your fee”.

Per the NCTA's Ex Parte filing with FCC: they are objecting only to pass-through fees applied by federal, state, and local authorities. They don't have any choice about any of these fees, which are really just taxes.

The choice they have (as is mentioned near the end of the article) is to pay them themselves (cost of running business) and include them in the advertised price (like it probably is anywhere in the world outside the US)

How is that better? You're asking for a world where the list price of Comcast Internet service is just quietly lower or higher depending on which suburb you live in. That's strictly worse than the current situation.

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.

It's better in exactly one way: you understand upfront what your internet is going to cost.

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.

Regarding VAT in Europe and similar systems in Canada and Mexico where it’s included in the listed price: in all such countries which I’ve personally experienced, the receipts still generally include a breakdown of which tax applies to which item, including correctly distinguishing when different taxes or tax rates apply to different items, and often a total of each tax or all taxes per receipt. You do get to care about those if you want to merely by looking at the details on your receipt, or not if you don’t, but the sticker price is the final price either way.

(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.

I didn't know Canada/Mexico mandated showing the total price, I thought Canada at least was in the same boat as the US.

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.

If we did, I didn't know. All of the price tags in Canada (or Ontario at least) are pre-tax.

Yeah I was wrong about that detail.

Good point. Despite having spent years living in Canada myself and acquiring a Canadian passport, I somehow fooled myself. Prices in Canada are usually advertised as before sales tax. Still, the rest of what I said was accurate - in places like Quebec where two overlapping sales taxes are usually applicable, the receipt does usually detail which taxes apply to which items and at what rates, which is what the ISPs seem to be objecting to for the various governmentally imposed taxes and fees they’re passing through to customers.

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.

NCTA proposed informing customers of the maximum amount of pass-through fees/taxes from governments customers might face, to avoid the "sticker shock" problem with bills.

Having the individual fees listed feels important to me for two reasons: one, to allow customers who are so inclined to check for any calculation errors, as a safeguard against accidental or intentional overcharging by the ISP; 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.

> Having the individual fees listed feels important to me for two reasons: one, to allow customers who are so inclined to check for any calculation errors, as a safeguard against accidental or intentional overcharging by the ISP

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.

> 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.

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.

Yes, why not, that seems reasonable. Your price is $60 plus up to $20 additional fees.

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)

Somehow T-Mobile figured that out. And charge me a nice round numbers that include all their fees and taxes. They are also able to advertise their prices nationwide.

And as a consumer you can choose to use them if you like that model. The market works!

Only if you magically know for free which companies are using that model and which aren't.

T-Mobile advertises, last I checked you can watch the adverts for free.

The problem is that companies are deceptive in their adverts (and in the US this is apparently just normal and accepted). A company's ability to put out an advert that says "we're honest, our adverts don't lie to you" doesn't solve this problem for obvious reasons.

As a T-Mobile customer, and not paid at all to endorse their services, I can assert that their adverts do not lie.

Verifying that you are what you claim is definitely not free.

What does this even mean?

That there's still no magical way to know for free which companies are honest about their pricing and which aren't, in the absence of regulation. You can claim that you're just a happy customer and not a paid astroturfer, but it's not easy for me to practically confirm that (again, assuming there's no regulation to stop people falsely claiming those things).

For a cellular company perhaps, but that doesn't solve the cable internet / ADSL / fiber side.

Sure it does. T-mobile is less of a scumbag than Cox or Comcast. Switch en mass and Cox and Comcast will start to figure it out.

They're European (Deutsche Telekom), which might be part of why they prefer to work that way.

My small regional ISP doesn't charge the fees that Comcast charges my neighbors in my building, those are included in its list price because they're a cost of the ISP doing business.

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.

As we both read the NCTA filing, we're both aware that NCTA is objecting to pass-through fees from federal, state, and local authorities, not to service fees they themselves make up.

That's already the case. ISPs have the freedom to charge prices that vary by region and available service tiers.

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 FCC order said the requirement to list "all charges that providers impose at their discretion" is meant to help broadband users "understand which charges are part of the provider's rate structure, and which derive from government assessments or programs." These fees must have "simple, accurate, [and] easy-to-understand name[s]," the FCC order said.

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....

No, these fees are devised by governments to be passed on to consumers. Not that it especially matters --- it's also the case that taxes levied directly to ISPs are passed to consumers, because money is fungible. But here, it's especially overt that this is money governments are collecting these fees from their constituents; they're just using the ISPs as bill collectors.

I am assuming here that the ISP is who would get in trouble for not sending the money to the locality, not the N individual customers. I'm also assuming that if I sent my ISP money for the internet cost, minus the passthrough costs, the ISP would act as if I owe them money.

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?

Fees should just be illegal for any service, across the board. Cost of internet should just be what it is, plus any actual sales tax. Price should just be the advertised price. Anyone that tacks on fees should just get immediately sued for the fees. Fuck 'em. Tired of the bullshit we put up with.

Europe is a wonderful place.

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)

I literally can't even imagine that utopia, because I still reflexively included a carve out for sales tax.

We have that system down here in New Zealand. However we have only two supermarket chains and a near monopoly for many consumer good and building supplies.

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.

I don’t think inclusive pricing and the cost of goods are necessarily linked, there are many other reasons goods and services could be more expensive in NZ.

Oh there are, rules around employees, consumer guarantees act, acc levies and various other things. But it seems unlikely that have just 2 food suppliers isn’t a root cause of food price issues.

Australian here

Isn't it mostly just economies of scale plus transport costs?

Or are our industrial relations laws really not as good?

It's more about farming subsidies and tax levels. Some governments choose to make food cheap by encouraging overproduction.

Overproduction (by subsidy) is also very useful to cope with poor harvests, supply shortages due to wars etc.

Discussion on the European system for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy#Ove...

It looks like New Zealand charges a 15% VAT which is applied when New Zealand residents buy anything in Europe but not when New Zealand goods are exported, maybe that could be where the cost is?

There is VAT when you buy in the UK too though. New Zealanders pay 50-100% what those in the UK do for groceries, though this varies depending on how you measure or what you read.

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-...

In Europe, it's still common to give a small tip. In Germany, it's called "trinkgeld" (literally "drink gold"). Usually, it's just rounding up to the nearest Euro or 5 Euros.

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.

In France, lots of restaurant give you a carafe, and they are obligated by law to give you free water if you ask (and you ordered something).

In the Netherlands, if a stranger shows up at your door and asks for water you are obligated to give it to them.

This is true everywhere on Earth, just perhaps not codified into law.

Really? Could you point me to that law? I think it's a cool rule but can't find it. Unless you mean in emergencies?

In Germany, there is "case law" to that effect. Letting someone suffer of thirst is "unterlassene Hilfeleistung", roughly translated "neglecting to give aid". Not giving someone suffering of thirst any water is considered as an example in legal literature, however, I know of no real case where someone was convicted solely for that. And it isn't really straightforward to argue that a restaurant not serving tap water would fulfil the criteria of "unterlassene Hilfeleistung", at least because the usual restaurant-goer isn't suffering that badly.

Also, aforementioned aid doesn't have to be free, the person benefiting from your aid owes you the cost of that aid.

> literally "drink gold"

"Geld" is not gold, its money. "Gold" is gold.

Tap water is expected to be included for free in Sweden, and I would be slightly surprised if that didn't also apply to our neighbors (Norway, Denmark and Finland). Getting charged for water is just as big a cultural shock for us as it is for you.

Interesting; I guess Germany is just different that way. I haven't been to Scandinavia yet.

Tap water is unfortunately not included in Denmark; getting charged 25kr per person is not uncommon. Its a bit of a disgrace, honestly.

But at least public toilets tend to be free whereas I believe in Sweden these tend to cost money.

yeah, public bathrooms have to be free. But as always it tends to come with an asterisk: for various reasons they may lock the doors and require a customer to ask for a key. IDK how legal it is but it's not uncommon to require purchasing food before using some public restrooms (not necessarily for fast food/grocery chains, but not unusual in either higher class dining or smaller mom and pop shops).

I think that one of the reasons you have been downvoted is because you are generalizing too much about Europe. Neither the tip culture nor ordering water works the same across the continent, not even across all Western European countries. There are European countries where one does not even round up the bill unless one really wants to, and countries where it is totally commonplace to order a big pitcher of tap water.

Fair enough. But I was replying to a comment that also generalized all of Europe as having no tipping culture. It just isn't true. I've been presented with credit card slips asking for a tip in multiple EU countries, exactly like when I go to a restaurant in the US. This is something you will never find in Japan.

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've been presented with credit card slips asking for a tip in multiple EU countries, exactly like when I go to a restaurant in the US.

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.

> In Europe, it's still common to give a small tip.

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 was specifically thinking of France, and how you just have to ask for "une carafe d'eau", to get free water at restaurant. In most parts of Italy, especially in the south, you usually get free water at the bar, if you are ordering something else, and even if you don't order anything (just ask it kindly).

> I assume, but in most of those I know they are happy to bring you some tap water

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.

> because they have their salary regardless.

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).

> Usually, it's just rounding up to the nearest Euro or 5 Euros.

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 ;)

>Giving 50 cent for a restaurant when only using the bathroom is just a sign of good behavior in my view.

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.

Restaurants don't charge you when you're already there as a customer ( as mentioned in my last example)? They charge you when you need to go and use them as a public toilet sometimes ( eg. when it's urgent).

Again, why would you do this? Just go to one of the countless public toilets outside. How often are people trying to use the toilets in a restaurant without eating there? It seems insane they would even worry about this.

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.

> Just go to one of the countless public toilets outside.

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.

> countless public toilets outside

Which might be also paid (assuming they even exist)

Civilized countries don't expect people to pay to use a toilet.

Tell that to Germany and a bunch of other countries in Europe (then again having to pay to use a toilet still sounds a bit better than having no toilet to use at all..)

Europe is a broad brush. Tap water is free (by law) in the UK, and there are only two places I've ever paid for a public toilet: a handful of stations cost 20-50p and a handful of nightclubs might have a bouncer who you appear to be expected to tip £1 in exchange for a spritz of cologne.

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.

incidentally the price of broadband is also much cheaper, you can get 1Gig in Dublin for 50 euros per month (about $54). For that price in LA I can get 50Mbps.

https://switcher.ie/broadband/ireland/dublin/?eircode=&tv_in...

That's not really consistent across Ireland though, let alone Europe. I was paying €50 a month for two megabit DSL in Kilkenny five years ago as that was all my ISP's backhaul was good for.

Sure and it's not true of comparison across the USA either, lots of places you just straight up cannot get a phone line let alone broadband. It is comparable across two metro areas though, I think that comparison is fair.

When I lived in Cincinnati, people had to choose DSL or cable internet, from two (which cable provider depended on part of town). Cable was the only fast option, unless you lived very-very close to a telco "switching office". Cost per month was more than double same-speed cost in Columbus. Columbus had multiple providers in each area. $35/month.

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. /-:

I’m not sure I get your point. I was trying to make the point they telcos in the USA are super shit and expensive and they don’t even provide value for money after all that.

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.

S'pose I was trying to reject the claim that prices should be comparable in different metros. I certainly wasn't saying that the dirth of competition in one place means the existing options were unimpeachable.

Sure. But have you tried paying for electricity here?

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.

Both of these things are rates set by the government. If they weren't charging VAT on the fees, they would just recalculate the base fees accordingly

Sure, but in the case of electricity, it's no different from the other poster's “just because we can fee” and “fee for processing your fee”. All these are added on top of the advertised "contract fee" and actual electricity price.

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.

I agree, and somehow I am lucky enough to have 1G AT&T Fiber Internet for exactly $100/month with no other fees. At my previous home I had 500mb microwave/millimeter wave Internet and that was not taxed either. Seems like local/state/federal government hasn’t caught onto these mediums yet.

> Fees should just be illegal for any service, across the board.

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.

That said, those fees are the reason "add free tv to your internet" is a huge scam on their part (and they make money on the advertising).

But the FCC order itself explicitly says that government imposed fees won't be affected. The quote is in the article.

this was my gripe with Sonic which people love over here in the Bay Area. their trucks and billboards advertise $40/month for gigabit speed (this was a while back when i had them). they then charge you $10/mo for a phone line which i never installed but it was part of the package and there was no way to avoid it. the phone line brings in additional fees like 911 and other local taxes + the taxes on internet service and my bill was more like $62/month. $22 more than their own advertised price.

I would have gladly paid $62/mo for gigabit speeds but i felt like i was overpaying them by $22 because of their ads.

More context here: https://forums.sonic.net/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=16903

I worked for a very large telco.

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.

I don't know what this means, but local franchise fees are in fact taxes.

When you eat at a restaurant do you see property tax on the bill? It is a cost of doing business, everyone has them.

When I eat at a restaurant, that business is not paying a per-seating fee to the city it's sited in. But that's what the ISPs are doing.

Why does that matter?

Because property taxes are a predictable, fixed fee, and ISP fees are usage taxes applied per-customer.

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.

Isn't fee based on location of where the service is provided? My ISP at the rental property doesn't care about my residential address. They only care about the address where their service is consumed. You can stop worrying about that restaurant, they will charge same fee all their customers as long as they don't deliver.

This is about labeling requirements at the point of sale, not about about the details of your bill, which already list these fees.

Are you saying that ISPs already have all this information and there is no problem for them to calculate these (checking the thread...) "unpredictable" fees?

They are allowed to list the maximum total price

No, in their objection they're specifically asking as an alternative to be allowed to do that.

They want to continue to spring it on you at the last step of signup

This is not necessarily true for all businesses in all locals. For instance if you buy a car in CA, they charge sales tax based on your home address, so two people could in fact buy the same product at the same dealer and pay different prices

This imaginary restaurant could just pay all these fees itself as a cost of doing business and transparently charge a slightly higher whole number to the average customer.

Either way, it really drives home the point that businesses don't pay taxes, the consumer does.

No, it can't!

Why not?

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.

Sorry, I thought you were implying that ISPs could opt instead to pay some lump sum to the various governments charging these fees, and not break them out per customer. They can't do that. Nor can they charge "$70 steak ($50 + taxes and fees)" --- that's what they want to do. It's the FCC that's saying the bill has to look the way you're complaining about.

Per the article, the FCC says ISPs are free to eat those costs behind the scenes and charge customers of the same plan the same flat rate (thus avoiding the need to itemize any taxes). The FCC is essentially creating an incentive structure that favors simplicity for consumers (possibly at the cost of making customers in low-tax areas pay a little more while those in high-tax areas pay a little less).

No, they can't --- the fees are different in neighboring municipalities. 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.

The ISPs are asking, explicitly, to be allowed to quote a "maximum possible" price inclusive all fees, non-itemized, like you suggest.

This part of the article seems to suggest that charging a flat rate that includes the base price plus the maximum possible taxes and fees would be allowed: "'A provider that opts to combine all of its monthly discretionary fees with its base monthly price may do so and list that total price. In that case, the provider need not separately itemize those fees in the label,' the FCC order said." I wonder what the ISPs' objection to this is, maybe that it would overcomplicate accounting?

You keep repeating your objection as though you haven't read any of the replies. I really think what you're saying is not true.

> 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.

>ISP fees are usage taxes applied per-customer

Can you please explain what you meant by this?

Sure, but they are paying those fees in exchange for the incredibly valuable privilege of (usually) an exclusive monopoly on broadband in an entire city.

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.

Franchise agreements usually do not grant exclusivity to providers. And they're not the only fees we're talking about; counties, states, and the federal government apply pass-through taxes to ISP customers as well.

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).

I just pulled up an old comcast bill and it has: "Federal Cost Recovery Fee" and "Universal Service Fund Surcharge (State)" and "Utility User’s Tax /Business" and "Universal Connectivity Charge" and "911 Line Tax (State)"

In the UK, for most bills, it is line rental + provider fee. Line rental is to pay for the copper wiring that is still used for landline phones and all of the infra for it (via local loop unbundling). It goes to OpenReach and every ISP resells it unless they plant their own infra (Virgin, Hyperoptic)

Most ISPs sell broadband only plans now, even on copper installations.

Those are all pass-through fees. They are just taxes.

They are not just taxes. Reimbursing the telco for their compliance costs makes about as much sense and reimbursing a restaurant for complying with local health code.

If they were actually taxes Comcast wouldn’t be fighting this rule, which does not apply to government mandated taxes.

I tracked down the FCC filing this article is about and read it. They are just taxes. There may be other things in the FCC rule that aren't about taxes, but the NCTA's objection is exclusively to the taxes.

Like most things, the government creates a problem then convinces everyone they aren't the reason.

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...

Do you think ATT is for or against not having to compete on every block?

I don't follow. In my specific case there has been one developer locked up already for collusion with the county so I think I'm fair in assuming the issue is not ATT in this case.

Most of these fees have nothing to do with exclusivity, and for the most part AT&T and Comcast don't get exclusivity in their franchise agreements. Go look yours up (your city or township should make it very simple to find, and if it doesn't, there's a reason for that!) and see if they got exclusivity.

As a tax lawyer, I must rebut your ridiculous claim that "franchise fees are in fact taxes."

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.

So it’s a compulsory contribution to state revenue levied by the government and added to the cost of the service? Because that’s what a tax is…

> 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.

Sounds like it's not compulsory though? The ISP is perfectly welcome to lay their lines via private lands (having negotiated permission with each landowner, naturally) if they'd prefer.

Well it’s not compulsory to pay your vehicle registration tax either, if you only want to drive your vehicle on private land.

I wouldn't consider that a "tax" either if that's all it's for. Do you consider national park entrance passes to be a tax?

Contrived arguments about whether something is a tax or a user fee has been a feature of politically motivated spin since basically forever. I would say any essential service (like access to internet, roads, healthcare, etc…) that requires for money to be paid to the government is taxes. There is no way to get access to the internet without paying these taxes to the government, and your suggestion to implement a private-land-only infrastructure is silly. There is no contiguous area of private land between my house and an ISP POP that doesn’t cross over publicly owned land. That’s almost certainly true for you too, and anybody else who’s reading this.

> I would say any essential service (like access to internet, roads, healthcare, etc…) that requires for money to be paid to the government is taxes. There is no way to get access to the internet without paying these taxes to the government, and your suggestion to implement a private-land-only infrastructure is silly. There is no contiguous area of private land between my house and an ISP POP that doesn’t cross over publicly owned land.

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.

Most taxes and fees from an ISP or telco have absolutely nothing to do with passing over public property. Many telco fees are in portion or in full a profit for the provider!

> Sounds like it's not compulsory though? The ISP is perfectly welcome to lay their lines via private lands (having negotiated permission with each landowner, naturally) if they'd prefer.

Streets cut cities into small islands of private lands. Therefore, you cannot reach anyone without crossing the public right of way.

Perhaps mere crossing should be treated as de minimis. But when you're closing and digging up the public street for days at a time, or perhaps even running your lines through publicly-maintained conduits and accessing them through publicly-maintained manholes, you're taking a lot more from the commons than that.

It's not compulsory. It's a fee for access to public rights of way. If the ISP doesn't want to pay the fee, they are free to figure out a way to provide connectivity without access to 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.

A royalty, paid to a government, as a condition of business?

Yes, I’d call it a sales tax, property tax, income tax, etc. based on what it was grounded in.

To put this as an example of why your logic doesn't work: it would mean that an utility bill is just a bill if paid to Comcast or Pacific Gas, but a tax if paid to a publicly-owned utility like LADWP for exactly the same services.

A bill isn't a tax just because it's a bill from the government.

Royalty != bill. When I pay the DMV to get replacement license plates, that's likewise not a tax just because the DMV is the government.

As a tax lawyer, you may not be allowed to call them taxes. Since I'm not one, I can apply the common sense definition, rather than the technical one.

The ISPs allow you to add "free television" with your internet service, then it turns out to be very NOT free. They do get lots of ad revenue even though they "don't charge" for the TV.

This comment doesn’t make a lot of sense, and with all the quotes it’s hard to tell if you mean it’s actually free or not.

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.

Years ago when signing up with a cable isp, I was offered cable television/cable box for no additional cost.

Except no additional cost sidestepped the monthly surcharges and taxes that ended up on the bill anyway.

> labeling all sorts of their own costs as "taxes"

This literally sounds like fraud to me. If I did that, i think i would get charged