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July 23, 2009
NYTimes' Pogue: Why we love our cellphones but hate our cellphone companies
Great column in the New York Times yesterday by David Pogue, pivoting off Congressional investigations of possible antitrust violations by the cellphone companies. In the column The Irksome Cellphone Industry, he asks "why do text message fees go up?, why do we pay for minutes when we are called as well as when we call?, etc." On text messages, he says: The carriers can’t possibly argue that transmitting text-message data costs them that much money. One blogger (http://bit.ly/gHkES) calculated that the data in a text message costs you about 61 million times as much as the same message sent by e-mail. Cell phone companies have many anti-consumer practices that they lock us into with PIRG-opposed Penalty Early Termination Fees and PIRG-opposed forced arbitration clauses in our contracts. Here's a recent creditcards.com story on the latest earth-shattering cracks in the forced arbitration wall. Forced arbitration has allowed firms to ignore consumer complaints and perpetuate unfair practices, knowing that the consumer had no recourse other than a stacked kangaroo court. Turns out that the unfair arbitration practices of the credit card guys may lead to reforms in all forced arbitration clauses, including cell phones.
Posted by Ed Mierzwinski at July 23, 2009 06:36 PM
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