California Regulators to Mobile Customers: Tough Luck

AP: California regulators suspend wireless customer protections. California utility regulators on Thursday suspended an 8-month-old crackdown on abusive practices in the wireless telephone industry, rebuffing the protests of consumer activists and the state's top law enforcement officials.

Comments

[Kim Helliwell]

This really has me steamed. I have a hard time with an industry that seems to feel that the only way to "keep costs/prices down" is to have no regulation requiring them to do anything, while consolidating until they have an effective monopoly.

The real way to keep prices down is to have vigorous competition, which forces the companies involved to watch costs. Anything else and they are kidding themselves or ripping off their customers.

I hope this can be reversed.

[Sean Fagan]

It's important to remember the crux of any Ahnuld decision: will it, ever, at any point, to any degree, displease a business?

If the answer is "yes," then he decides against it, no matter how many consumers are harmed.

[Charlie Prael]

You guys didn't read the article very well. The swing vote is Steve Poizner.

[clancy Hughes]

Internet Tax
Once more to the barricades brave friends

A key congressional committee has proposed that a tax, originally created to pay for the Spanish American War, should be extended to all Internet and data connections. The committee proposed that the 3 percent telecommunications tax might be revised to cover all data, thus all information to end-users.

A taxation on information amounts to a taxation on speech. Where are the advocates of the constitution? Since when do Republicans advocate more taxes, or is this a “taxes two step”? How very regressive. A meaningless term but maybe it fits here.

Next, we might consider taxing speech, but then women talk more than men do. That would be even more regressive, huh. Maybe we should tax the air that we breathe. We could cut down on the carbon dioxide emissions, a CO2 tax. We could hold our breath on New Year’s Eve and defer the tax to the next year.

We already have an Internet tax on our phone bill. That’s got to go. The dumbest thing we could do now would be to add further impediment to an egalitarian free flow of information.

More tragic yet, the imposition of an information tax establishes a reporting requirement for the flow of data that can only be accounted for by an intermediary—“Ah ha, the phone company”--when in fact, no intermediary is needed at all!