Believe it or not, Comcast is probably right about this.
I'm on a commission in my local municipality that oversees the franchise contract with Comcast, and we've been hung up in negotiations with them for years over the new contract, with the sticking point being "pass-through franchise fees", I think largely pertaining to PEG ("Public, Educational, and Governmental") programming.
The thing to understand about pass-through fees is: they're not Comcast fees. They're municipal taxes collected by providers, which municipalities ask to have labeled as "fees", because they're too chickenshit to acknowledge that they're (in our case) raising $850k pa for "PEG programming" (most of which just goes into the general fund) from Comcast users.
What's crazymaking is that these fees for technical and historical reasons apply to Comcast, but not to AT&T, Comcast's primary regional competitor --- so it's a tax on the customers of a particular company, ostensibly for public access programming, but really that's just a pretense.
I can't blame Comcast in the least for pushing back on having standardized labeling for this kind of thing, which varies from township to township.
These are surreptitious taxes municipalities are forcing Comcast to collect. Why is Comcast being asked to build new IT infrastructure to warn residents that their local government is screwing them over?
There is in this instance, because the "fees" we're talking about here are intrinsically non-transparent --- they're not fees, they're taxes, and local governments force Comcast to call them fees in their franchise contracts. Comcast probably shouldn't play along here, because those taxes harm their users.
I'm betting that if I surveyed my town, not one resident in 50 knows they're being charged a Comcast Tax by the local government; they just assume these fees are all Comcast soaking them. That's a problem, not because Comcast is good (they're odious), but because it establishes a precedent that municipalities can raise money from residents without going through the actual transparent levy process that everyone pays attention to. Fuck that! Municipal governments should get in front of their residents and tell them they're doing this, and not sneak it onto Comcast's price label as if it were a decision Comcast had made.
Wouldn't Comcast want customers to know, then? Why would Comcast not be jumping in joy at the chance to explicitly state "Hickville Municipal Broadband Tax/Fee" on their bills and get people to complain to the municipality about it?
Because nobody realizes that these are taxes; most customers just look at the bottom line, then scan up to see all the nickle-and-dime bullshit Comcast is charging them, and municipalities know this and slip into it. It's a dark pattern.
I don't think anyone cares if they are called fees or taxes. The question is: Why can't Comcast calculate/list them at the point of sale? They seem to be able to easily calculate and list them when it's time to bill. Shouldn't there be an API endpoint somewhere called listAllFeesForStreetAddress(address) that both the billing and the marketing system can call? The fact that the billing systems do this but the marketing systems don't must be a deliberate choice by the company.
Why aren't you asking for a legal standard municipalities have to adhere to to publish a machine-readable summary of cable/internet franchise fees given a URL with a zip code embedded in it? It's the municipality behind these fees, not Comcast.
It is difficult! At every point of sale, they need a system that generates a price list for arbitrary zip codes. It's not insurmountable, obviously, but it's a thing they're being asked to build, that they shouldn't have to build at all, because these fees are bullshit.
Sooo, what's the problem? They already know what the customer has to pay, so why are they spending extra effort to show a different fake price instead?
> I can't blame Comcast in the least for pushing back on having standardized labeling for this kind of thing, which varies from township to township.
To be fair, for a billion dollar company with literal billions in profit from a subsidized mono/duopoly and considering there are only so many towns in so many states where they operate, this is super weak. It can totally be done even if tedious, expensive, and time consuming. Thing is, most of the work has already been done accounting wise because they need to comply with the laws in those areas. Now they just need to report it accurately at point of sale.
> Believe it or not, Comcast is probably right about this.
I read this more as being about either "we can't right now" than it is about "we can't ever do it." They're obviously able to generate bills for all customers, so they clearly know what fees are being passed on to consumers. Now, it's very likely that those values may not be exposed to their sales/marketing systems used to provide quotes to consumers, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't be.
DISCLAIMER!
One of my first experiences was for a company that created SaaS billing software (founded just before SaaS became a term) for telecoms, so we had to deal with all manners of rates, tiers, tapers, discounts, taxes, fees, etc. that all varied by location and one feature we provided was being able to give the exact combination of all of those things that would apply to a given geographic area (typically zip code). It was fantastically complicated.
So what's preventing them from just providing a price calculator where you can enter your ZIP code and get an itemized invoice? Don't forget to include the taxes, of course.
If they can charge it, they can show it. Any concerns/issues with municipal fees, taxes, etc. is a completely tangential issue.
Just as easily, Comcast could choose to simplify pricing... T-Mobile charges "tax-inclusive" rates that give you a nice round number net of taxes/fees. These are free choices and can be leveraged as a competitive advantage should the companies choose.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 76.1 ms ] threadI'm on a commission in my local municipality that oversees the franchise contract with Comcast, and we've been hung up in negotiations with them for years over the new contract, with the sticking point being "pass-through franchise fees", I think largely pertaining to PEG ("Public, Educational, and Governmental") programming.
The thing to understand about pass-through fees is: they're not Comcast fees. They're municipal taxes collected by providers, which municipalities ask to have labeled as "fees", because they're too chickenshit to acknowledge that they're (in our case) raising $850k pa for "PEG programming" (most of which just goes into the general fund) from Comcast users.
What's crazymaking is that these fees for technical and historical reasons apply to Comcast, but not to AT&T, Comcast's primary regional competitor --- so it's a tax on the customers of a particular company, ostensibly for public access programming, but really that's just a pretense.
I can't blame Comcast in the least for pushing back on having standardized labeling for this kind of thing, which varies from township to township.
These are surreptitious taxes municipalities are forcing Comcast to collect. Why is Comcast being asked to build new IT infrastructure to warn residents that their local government is screwing them over?
Nothing wrong about transparency
I'm betting that if I surveyed my town, not one resident in 50 knows they're being charged a Comcast Tax by the local government; they just assume these fees are all Comcast soaking them. That's a problem, not because Comcast is good (they're odious), but because it establishes a precedent that municipalities can raise money from residents without going through the actual transparent levy process that everyone pays attention to. Fuck that! Municipal governments should get in front of their residents and tell them they're doing this, and not sneak it onto Comcast's price label as if it were a decision Comcast had made.
That sounds like clear BS to me, because they have no problem handling that stuff when it comes to collecting the payments.
To be fair, for a billion dollar company with literal billions in profit from a subsidized mono/duopoly and considering there are only so many towns in so many states where they operate, this is super weak. It can totally be done even if tedious, expensive, and time consuming. Thing is, most of the work has already been done accounting wise because they need to comply with the laws in those areas. Now they just need to report it accurately at point of sale.
I read this more as being about either "we can't right now" than it is about "we can't ever do it." They're obviously able to generate bills for all customers, so they clearly know what fees are being passed on to consumers. Now, it's very likely that those values may not be exposed to their sales/marketing systems used to provide quotes to consumers, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't be.
DISCLAIMER! One of my first experiences was for a company that created SaaS billing software (founded just before SaaS became a term) for telecoms, so we had to deal with all manners of rates, tiers, tapers, discounts, taxes, fees, etc. that all varied by location and one feature we provided was being able to give the exact combination of all of those things that would apply to a given geographic area (typically zip code). It was fantastically complicated.
(1) They vary from municipality to municipality
(2) Customers don't make purchasing decisions exclusively in their own municipality
(3) They aren't Comcast's fees to begin with.
Just as easily, Comcast could choose to simplify pricing... T-Mobile charges "tax-inclusive" rates that give you a nice round number net of taxes/fees. These are free choices and can be leveraged as a competitive advantage should the companies choose.