Sneaky fees; Am I crazy?

Sneaky fees; Am I crazy? 

When I was a child growing up just outside New York City during the 1970s, I learned to be afraid of getting mugged.  But this is not that.  The criminals I’m talking about don’t bop anyone over the head and steal hundreds of dollars.  These criminals slowly take $5, $10, and $20 from me, often with a smile. They pop a surcharge onto my monthly phone bill. They pad my TV bill with services I didn’t ask for.  They drain my bank account — drip, drip, drip — when I’m not watching.  These hidden fees keep me up late at night like the sound of a leaky faucet. I feel like I have to watch everything all the time, because it’s so easy to miss some statement on some form with some asterisk that means the company can take even more money from me. And when that happens, I suffer from what I call small print rage.        

Am I crazy? Or am I just paying attention? One thing I know for sure: I’m not alone.

I’m not a therapist, or a sociologist, but I feel on firm ground saying that small print rage is a close second only to road rage as a source of angst in America today.

Unauthorized Charges on Your Local Phone - Utility Bill? R2

Unauthorized Charges on Your Local Phone - Utility Bill? R2
FCC fines Verizon over 'mystery' fees $25 million and $52 million in refunds – 10/28/2010

How to Find Them, Eliminate Them & Get Your Money Back!
If your business still gets its phone service through the old "AT&T and Verizon, etc" local phone company (as opposed to one of the newer competitive phone providers) then you need to double check your phone bill each and every month for charges you did not authorize. You may not know it but the local phone company allows other companies to bill you through your local phone bill. And while the local phone company allows other businesses to bill you through your local phone bill, the local phone company does not verify that the charges being billed to you by the other company are valid. When these unauthorized charges fraudulently appear on your phone bill it's called "cramming". Unfortunately you as the business owner or manager are the only one that can spot the unauthorized charges and if you don't comb over your bill every month to spot these unauthorized charges - you'll pay for them.

Customers get crammed when a dishonest company puts charges on their phone bill (landline or wireless) for services that were not wanted or authorized.

Why does the local phone company allow other companies to pass charges onto your phone bill? "Third-party billing" is supposedly a great convenience in that you only have to pay one bill instead of separate bills for obvious authorized phone related charges like yellow-page advertising in the "real yellow pages", 411 information calls and long-distance calls from your chosen long distance carrier. Over the years though, some less-than-scrupulous companies have realized that most businesses rarely scrutinize their local-phone bills. To take advantage of this, these companies have come up with elaborate schemes to place unauthorized charges on your phone bill that you'll end up paying for without even thinking. Unauthorized charges you can end up paying for include charges for unwanted (and unused) email accounts, web sites, directory information calls, directory advertising in obscure publications, voice mail accounts and other services.
In theory, before these charges can be placed on your phone bill, the company that is originating the third-party billed charges is supposed to have a verification of the order like a voice recording. In reality though, all the company needs to do to initiate the charge is submit your name and phone number to the billing entity. The verifications are only required to be produced if a complaint is filed.
To prevent these charges from appearing on you business phone bill it's helpful to understand the four parties that make unauthorized third party phone charges a costly reality. Party number one is any employee who can answer your business phones. The  un-authorized charge is rarely random and it usually happens after one of your company employees gets a telemarketing call. Employees should be instructed to document and report any overly aggressive telemarketing calls they receive. Party number two is the telemarketing company that originates the unauthorized charges by trying to get your employee to accept some service for which you'll be billed through your local phone bill. Party number three is the third-party billing company that has billing agreements with your local phone company. The name of the third-party billing is the one that is prominently displayed on your phone bill. After the third-party billing company's name is the name of the company that is originating the unwanted charges. Party number four is your "former Ma Bell" local phone company that collects the unwanted charges (keeps a share for "Ma") and then passes the rest to the third-party billing company (who keeps a big share) and then passes the balance on to the company that initiated the unwanted charge.

Third-party charges on U.S. consumer and business telephone bills, most of them unauthorized by the customer, amount to US $2 billion a year, according to a new report from a U.S. Senate committee.

Unauthorized third-party charges on telephone bills, often called cramming, cost one national retail chain $550,000 over the last decade, not including the $400,000 the company spent to fight the mystery charges, said the report, resulting from a year-long investigation by the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.
Telephone carriers have made more than $1 billion[b] in revenue from third-party charges in the past decade, said Senator John "Jay" Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat and committee chairman. Carriers get a fee for placing third-party charges on bills, according to the report.
The best way for consumers to protect themselves is to call their local phone company and request that it shut off third-party billing services -- many will, for free.  Consumers who've been crammed and scammed should call their local phone company and insist on a refund; they should also file a complaint with their state attorney general's office and the FTC. But most important: Scan those phone bills every month for surprise charges and unwanted services. They're easy to miss.
**Following are some of the top third-party billing names and unauthorized charge originators you'll find on your phone bill. If you see these names on your phone bill you'll want to call the toll free number listed next to the charge to confirm it's a charge that's been properly authorized to be placed on your bill. Following are actual examples that we've recently found while auditing business phone bills.
We recommend customers should review any utility bills issued by deregulated utility companies. (In most instances today, consumers are paying higher charges to the deregulated gas and electric supply companies).
All Utility - Energy, gas, electric and water bills should be reviewed for proper reading and tariff.
If you suspect that you have been overcharged ask for detailed explanation and or file a complaint with your State Utility Commission.

YJ Draiman for Mayor of LA

Renewableenergy2@msn.com
http://www.renewableenergy2.com

Ma Bell’s Breakup: 25 Years Later, Everything Old Is New Again

The break-up of Ma Bell in 1984 had a goal of greater efficiency, lower prices and more rapid technology development thanks to competition. It’s been 25 years since Judge Harold Green ended AT&T Inc.’s monopoly of the phone business, and while the industry has indeed seen unprecedented innovation, the state of competition continues to fail the consumer. Because after all, like the mercury-like Terminator in T2: Judgment Day, you can break Ma Bell apart, but it always seems to come back together. And it’s after you.
AT&T in 2009 looks a lot like AT&T in 1984, only bigger (motto: “local, long-distance and now introducing wireless!”). It’s also more global and more capable. In fact, Ma Bell in general is back, albeit in a three-headed form that comprises the powerful Verizon Communications Inc., Qwest Communications International Inc. and AT&T itself. It raises the question: Is there still room for competitors? And what should those competitors look like? A look at history could lead to the answers.

Regulatory Failures

The reconstitution of the Bell pseudo-monopoly has been slow and some would say insidious, aided and abetted by pro-consolidation and pro-RBOC regulatory decisions that have limited the number of local residential service providers in a given market.
Consider the Telecom Act of 1996, which created the era of non-facilities-based CLECs. The idea was admirable but the model was flawed: Force the LECs to unbundle their local loops in order to lease them at a discounted rate to competitors. The RBOCs had no interest in doing any such thing, and amid heavy lobbying and cries for the need for free market economics in the industry, the death of government-mandated UNE-P pricing came in March 2006.

The Consolidation Factor

In spite of all of this, you could also say that competition, ironically, is the primary reason Ma Bell is back today. The post-Telecom Act CLEC era provided fodder for the RBOCs to justify consolidation, and then there’s the long-distance factor.
Back in 1984, AT&T divested its local business in return for the ability to get into the computing game. And, as we know, it became a long-distance player. When MCI and Sprint were created by entrepreneurs to challenge AT&T in the reach-out-and-touch-someone game, no one foresaw the fact that very little differentiation in long-distance POTS service meant an inevitable price war. It was a race to zero that forced all three to find an exit strategy. Sprint fled to business services and of course became Sprint-Nextel Corp., best known as a (struggling) wireless operator. But MCI and AT&T were ripe acquisition targets.
Regulators paved the way for RBOCs to offer data, VoIP and long-distance services out-of-region, but an already-built national long-distance network was an attractive proposition. When Southwestern Bell became SBC Communications Inc. it leaped at the chance to buy AT&T the long-distance company. Then it adopted the AT&T name for itself and bought BellSouth, and putting together its wireless network while it was at it.
Verizon followed a similar path: In 1997, Bell Atlantic acquired NYNEX, then merged with GTE in 2000 to form Verizon. After a bidding war with Qwest, Verizon bought MCI, meanwhile adding to its wireless assets.
And around the same time that AT&T and Verizon were being created, Qwest, a fiber-optic long-distance company, bought the RBOC US West, making for the same DNA as the others, without wireless: Qwest partners with Verizon (who else?) to provide wireless service to consumers.

New Competitive Hope

Ma Bell 25 years later? Alive and well. Competition? Not so much. The takeaway is that despite its stated goal of supporting competition, the FCC has created a communications landscape that is dominated by a handful of providers. But technological innovation, particularly in IP services and wireless, may provide avenues for more choices.
A handful of ideas:
1) Wireless. Despite the unrelenting domination of Verizon and AT&T in the market, consumers still can choose T-Mobile USA Inc. or Sprint to substitute their home lines with wireless service; both companies have rolled out programs to encourage consumers to do just that. T-Mobile’s wlmailhtml:{B15B5703-3626-4029-9348-79DC6C0AB62F}mid://00001440/!x-usc:mailto:Hotspot@Home offering uses Wi-Fi to supercharge in-home coverage and quality; Sprint does the same with its Airave femtocell service. The rise of mobile broadband is another pro-competitive phenomenon: Clearwire Corp. is poised to become a viable national competitor once its VoIP-ready WiMAX network is deployed. There’s also still life in the MVNO model.
Facilities-based CLECs were left standing to provide choice in the market, but to this day they’re hobbled by the need for affordable last-mile solutions outside of their coverage footprints. Microwave solutions and fiber-based carrier’s carriers can fill in some of the blanks, but viability remains an expensive business, particularly when faced with the branding and marketing machines of the incumbents. No wonder most CLECs focus on regional business niches.
Meanwhile, cable companies have become the main residential competitors, engaged in a pitched battle with the ILECs for the hearts and minds within the home. Here, too, regulators have failed consumers, by preventing the cablecos themselves from competing with each other in the same markets. One LEC, one cableco: That’s what constitutes choice for most American homes.
What about those that want to cut the home line cord and go wireless? Ma Bell wins again: AT&T and Verizon are the two largest wireless providers in the United States. The FCC attempted to create a new national wireless player with last year’s 700MHz spectrum auction; but the big winners were, you guessed it, the RBOCs.
2) VoIP. Consumer VoIP often elicits a shudder since over-the-top competitors like Vonage Holdings Corp. have struggled financially and in some cases imploded. However PC-based services like Skype are getting smart, making mobility a central part of the strategy and wrapping in Web functionality like IM, presence and IP video to provide a compelling differentiation to traditional RBOC service. Not just for cheap calls anymore, companies like Jajah and Truphone are also capitalizing on the popularity of the iPhone and social networking to appeal to a wider cross-section of consumers with a wireless-centric application play.
3) Computing. The idea of cloud-based and Web-delivered voice and data services is becoming a dominant conversation, and new market entrants from the computing sector are accordingly hopping into the breach. Google Inc. for instance is adding new Web services into its application portfolio all the time, and offers Google Talk voice chat. Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc. are of course wireless players. And open application server companies like Broadsoft are providing ways to embed voice in productivity and Web applications to provide voice mash-ups that in many cases could replace traditional telephony or give facilities-based CLECs a way to add revenue and pull more market share from the RBOCs.

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A Look at Innovation

Ma Bell gave birth to seven regional Baby Bells in 1984, and the good news is that an era of competitive innovation began that eclipsed the sum total of the previous 108 years since Alexander Graham Bell completed the first telephone call.
Some highlights:

• Mobile wireless voice became a reality.
• Fiber optics and microprocessors became game-changers.
• IPTV and IP video are mainstream.
• The dot-com bust, the fall of Worldcom and the telecom winter of 2001 taught us the meaning of the term “irrational exuberance.”
• The line between data providers and voice providers has blurred beyond comprehension. IP services and VoIP have radically changed both the cost of delivering services and the types of services delivered.
• The back office, OSS and equipment vendor landscapes leapt ahead by light years in terms of technology, tapping into the network transformation opportunity.
• Ecosystems of third-party applications have sprung up, sounding a death knell to the traditional walled garden approach.
• Unified communications for the enterprise is a reality.
• Wi-Fi whet an appetite for wireless broadband that shows no sign of abating.
• Pervasive mobile broadband will be here sooner rather than later.
• Cloud and Web-delivered services for consumers and businesses alike appear to be leading the next communications revolution.
• Mobile broadband devices are ever more intelligent.
• The death of the desktop is coming.

Deregulation

Breaking up the Telephone monopoly

An old AT&T ad

It was a battle of giants, with the federal government taking on American Telephone & Telegraph, the world's largest corporation with assets valued at $125 billion, which made it bigger than U.S. Steel, General Motors and Exxon combined.  The second largest employer in the nation -- the federal government was the first -- AT&T employed over one million people.  It had three million stockholders, the most of any American company.  It made a daily profit of $15 million, using 1.7 million miles of wires, cable and circuitry to handle 600 million calls a day.  AT&T was a federally regulated "authorized" monopoly, providing 80 percent of U.S. telephone service, but in 1974 the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit against Ma Bell, accusing it of forcing operating companies to purchase equipment from its Western Electric subsidiary, of undercutting competitors' prices, and of obstructing a 1968 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruling that customers could connect non-Bell equipment to phone lines.

Those expecting a trial of epic proportions -- many believed it would go on for one or two years -- were disappointed when U.S. District Court Judge Harold Greene decided on January 16, 1981 to recess until February 2, allowing the two sides to negotiate an out-of-court settlement.  AT&T's competitors, such as MCI and Southern Pacific Communications, suspected the Carter administration of rushing to cut a deal to make sure none of the credit went to the incoming Reaganites.  The proposed settlement would have allowed Ma Bell to enter the burgeoning data-processing and computer markets -- a concession that would void a 1956 decree restricting AT&T to telecommunications -- in return for its spinning off parts of Western Electric (its equipment manufacturing arm) and several of the 22 regional Bell telephone companies.

Initially, Reagan's Justice Department urged the White House to reject the settlement.  Assistant Attorney General William Baxter, head of the department's antitrust division, wanted to pursue the suit against Ma Bell.  But in January 1982 Baxter announced that another out-of-court settlement had been reached.  This time AT&T agreed to sell its regional local-service companies while retaining its Long Line service, Bell Labs, and Western Electric.  This amounted to a divestiture of two-thirds of its total assets.  On the same day, the government dropped its 12-year antitrust suit against computer giant International Business Machines (IBM).  Critics charged that this demonstrated the Reagan administration's commitment to freeing corporations from government oversight.  But that wasn't such a bad idea, according to economist Lester C. Thurow.  America needed healthy corporate giants like AT&T and IBM to compete effectively in the new global economy.  For the first time, said Thurow, American corporations faced foreign equals like Mitsubishi, Wang and Philips. "Bigness is not always badness," he concluded.

While the government seemed to get most of what it wanted out of the deal, former FCC chairman Richard Wiley called the settlement "a brilliant masterstroke on the company's part."  Stock market analysts predicted greater profits for a slimmed-down AT&T no longer encumbered with the high-cost, low-profit local companies. Stockholders kept their original number of shares in the parent corporation and received one share in each of the seven new regional companies for every ten AT&T shares owned.  The expectation was that the breakup would result in lower long-distance costs and sharply higher local phone service prices.  AT&T had charged higher prices for long distance service to keep local service costs down by as much as 50 percent of what they would have been otherwise.  This subsidization allowed a customer to pay $7 for a $29 phone line installation in San Francisco, and 10 cents rather than a quarter for a New York City pay-phone call.  Few doubted that the divestiture, the largest in history, would have far-reaching consequences, both for Ma Bell and her customers.

AT&T's potential rivals in the field of data processing were concerned because Ma Bell already owned a lot of high tech electronics equipment.  Its subsidiary, Bell Labs, was the world's foremost research and development operation, responsible for the development of the transistor, the laser, the semiconductor and the microchip.  Its scientists had won seven Nobel Prizes.  In short, AT&T was quite capable of competing in the high tech communications world with firms like IBM, RCA and GTE.  But the principal concern of telephone subscribers was whether local service quality would suffer while costs soared when the breakup took place in January 1984. Michigan's public service commission feared that up to 250,000 Michigan residents would not be able to afford service.  Universal telephone service had been the achieved goal of the federally regulated AT&T monopoly.  This now seemed to be in jeopardy.

In his ruling on the settlement, Judge Green ordered AT&T to assist the seven new regional phone companies in recovering the $2.6 billion cost of providing access to long distance carriers if they were unable to recoup that expenditure in ten years.  (The judge also forced the corporation to divest itself of the Bell name and logo; the loss of the 123-year-old nickname seemed to distress AT&T more than anything else.)  Congress held hearings and considered subsidies for low-income telephone customers.  Rep. Timothy Wirth (D-Colo.) proposed a surcharge on long distance calls with the revenue going into a national telecommunications fund to offset local service costs. The FCC decided that all residential users would pay a two dollar monthly access charge, and business users a six dollar monthly charge, to subsidize the new regionals.  Pacific Telesis sought a $1.3 billion increase in local rates, while Southwestern Bell asked regulators to approve a $1.2 billion increase which would triple phone bills.  Some analysts predicted a 500 percent increase in some charges over the next ten years.  Anxious customers awaited the 1984 breakup with understandable trepidation.

Long distance carriers competed for customers with a dizzying array of come-ons -- free call time for signing up and credit for purchasing an array of products and services.  The FCC freed AT&T's long distance rivals from rate regulation, while AT&T remained regulated.  AT&T was required to provide nationwide service while the newcomers could choose to operate only in the most profitable areas, and paid only a fraction of what AT&T paid local telephone companies for access to their customers.  But even though its rates remained generally higher, AT&T was still the preferred service for a majority of long distance callers.  (Its share of the long distance market was expected to decline from 94 to 65 percent.)  In the early years, the newcomers had substantial quality problems.  Connections were often poor and sometimes could not be established at all. Some carriers were accused of using the old "bait and switch," quoting one subscription rate but charging another.  And customers were overcharged to the tune of $100 million a year for uncompleted calls.  On September 1, 1986 some 95 million telephone subscribers were required to choose one long distance supplier.  Those who did not vote -- about 30 percent -- were assigned a carrier.  AT&T spent $200 million while MCI and GTE Sprint each spent about $75 million in huge publicity campaigns prior to the service election.  AT&T remained the preferred supplier.

The debate as to whether the breakup was beneficial to the consumer continued throughout the 1980s.  Subscribers were faced with a greater choice in services and products.  But they were inundated with marketing ploys by competing suppliers, and generally paid more to use the telephone.  A deeply ingrained suspicion of monopolies and faith in free market concepts had their price.

A Telecommunications Revolution

The breakup of Ma Bell marked the beginning of a telecommuni-cations revolution thanks to innovations such as fiber optics and microprocessors.  Future profits for companies like AT&T depended on providing new information services.  In 1983 about 180,000 cellular mobile phones were in service; that number was expected to grow to 1.5 million by the end of the Eighties.  More than 18 million subscribers to the new paging services was expected by 1990.  Telephone circuitry would be used to deliver electronic mail.  The New York Stock Exchange, the Mormon Churc h, major corporations and some state agencies established their own phone services, using microwave antennas and communication satellites.  New telephone tech-nology provided features like call forwarding, remote retrieval of stored calls, and cordless phones.