The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use "Plain English" to Rob You Blind Read Free

included in the basic price.
    Bit by bit, the line items grew, and others were added. It was easy to miss the escalating prices because they came separately over time—a nickel on one line of the bill, a quarter or two on another. With many small line items, people tended not to notice how the total was creeping upward much faster than the rate of inflation or the size of their income.
    Kushnick found his aunt’s bills printed on multiple slips of paper, making it hard to spot everything at once. He noticed some charges werefor services his aunt did not use; a few were for services she couldn’t possibly use because her telephone was too antiquated. And the monthly rental for the phone itself? Kushnick calculated that his aunt had paid more than twenty times the price of the instrument with that small monthly rental fee.
    One of the fastest-growing items Kushnick found on his aunt’s bill was labeled “FCC Subscriber Line Charge.” Other phone companies call this “FCC Charge for Network Access” or “Federal Line Cost Charge” or “Interstate Access Charge.” Variations include “Federal Access Charge,” “Interstate Single Line Charge,” “Customer Line Charge,” “FCC-Approved Customer Line Charge” and even “End User Fee.”
    These may sound like government fees, or perhaps a disguised tax on telephone users that goes into federal coffers. Not so. Each of those labels identifies the charge for connection to the long-distance network. The government does not collect a penny from that charge. All the money goes to the phone companies.
    According to Federal Communications Commission rules, phone bills are supposed to be easy to understand. The FCC truth-in-billing policy supposedly “improve[s] consumers’ understanding of their telephone bills.” According to the FCC:
    Section 64.2401 of the rules requires that a telephone company’s bill must: (1) be accompanied by a brief, clear, non-misleading, plain language description of the service or services rendered; (2) identify the service provider associated with each charge; (3) clearly and conspicuously identify any change in service provider; (4) contain full and non-misleading descriptions of charges; (5) identify those charges….
    Despite the misleading labeling of the network “line charge,” the FCC has approved it for years, officially helping confuse consumers. Among the honest descriptions the FCC might have required would be “long-distance system access” and “telephone company network charge.”
    Inspired by his study of the evolution of the phone bill, Bruce Kushnick decided to find out how many people were misled by terms like “FCC Subscriber Line Charge.” In a survey of one thousand Americans, he found three people who understood their phone bill, which means 99.7 percent did not. Round to the nearest whole number, and Kushnick’s finding was that 100 percent of those surveyed did not understand their phone bill. In effect,
no one
understands his or her telephone bill, whichamounts to a powerful rebuke to FCC policies that clearly harm consumers and benefit the telephone companies. In the years since that survey, however, the FCC has made no meaningful changes to rules that allow phone companies to confuse people. Don’t blame the FCC staff for that. As with all government agencies, the bureaucrats do what the politicians tell them to do.
    PROMISES, PROMISES
    What Leipzig and Kushnick encountered were early signs that the lower prices made possible by competition and digital technology were just empty promises. This involved more than money, since the telephone industry, together with the cable television industry, quietly saw to it that written into the fine print were laws and regulations that made it easier for them to minimize their investments in new technology and to serve only the customers the companies wanted.
    Since 1913 Americans had enjoyed a legal right to a landline telephone at any address, but by 2012 that