Junk Food For The Soul

So, it turns out that last year the FCC decided to change their regulations on DSL and drop a fee that was being charged to all DSL subscribers. Great, huh? Your DSL bill will go down a few bucks, right?

Well, not if you are with Verizon or BellSouth. Beginning this month, when the fee is no longer necessary, those companies will simply charge you the same amount and pocket the difference. Since most people don’t pay attention to their bill unless the due amount changes and you usually can’t figure out what all the little charges are anyway, they figure no one will notice.

CNET reports:

Verizon DSL customers subscribing to its 768Kbps (kilobits per second) service paid about $1.25 into USF every month, and customers of its 3Mbps (megabits per second) service paid about $2.83 per month, the company said. BellSouth customers were charged $2.97 per month for USF, according to the BellSouth Web site.

But now that the fee has been eliminated, as of Aug. 14, neither Verizon nor BellSouth plan to pass the savings on to consumers. Instead, Verizon has added a new “supplier surcharge” starting Aug. 26 that’s $1.20 per month for the slower service and $2.70 for the faster service. BellSouth said it will keep its $2.97 fee, which it continues to call a “regulatory cost recovery fee.”

Verizon says they are going to add a new fee to help support their dying phone line subscriptions. They say too many people are simply choosing DSL and not getting a phone line and, even though they charge those customers an extra $5 a month, they need to make up that money somehow.

BellSouth doesn’t even offer stand-alone DSL. They force you to get their phone service if you want DSL. But since they can’t use the same excuse as Verizon, they say the fee is “to offset costs incurred in complying with regulatory obligations and other expenses. The fee also recovers costs associated with additional systems necessitated by federal regulation, as well as costs associated with monitoring, participating in and complying with regulatory proceedings, and other network and servicing requirements.”

Um, yeah. Consumer groups beg to differ.

“Verizon and BellSouth are using the situation to pocket more revenue from every customer by labeling this fee, which customers are already used to paying, something else,” said Jeannine Kenney, senior policy analyst for Consumers Union. “BellSouth is clearly misrepresenting what the fee will pay for. I mean how can this be a ‘regulatory cost recovery’ when DSL is no longer regulated?”

Mark Cooper, director of research at the Consumer Federation of America, believes that Congress should take the phone companies’ recent actions as a warning of what could happen if lawmakers do not impose Net Neutrality regulation, a hot topic being debated in Washington. Without Net Neutrality legislation, network owners, such as the phone companies, could charge third parties, like Vonage or Google, extra fees for offering services over the phone companies’ broadband networks. Phone companies have argued that if they could provide Internet companies premium services for a fee, broadband customers could ultimately benefit through lower-priced and more innovative services.

“They made similar arguments when they lobbied to be excused from USF regulatory obligations that doing so would benefit consumers,” Cooper said. “And here they are, free from those regulations, and they still stick it to the consumer.”

I refuse to support the phone companies. I made that vow as soon as the Net Neutrality debate began. This just helps reaffirm that commitment. While I’m no fan of the Comcast, my current ISP, I find the cable companies to be the lesser of two evils for now. Just barely.