said by 88615298:So if these meters are mesed up how long are customers going to be screwed over while the governemnt "inquires"?
If they take matters into their own hands, probably not long. The story itself makes my point about the users not being stupid:
Users there had to make a concerted effort to get the ISP to investigate and to issue refunds.
So users had to get a little noisy about it, but they were given refunds without government regulators forcing them to.
Of course, the flip side to that is if a customer base is too apathetic to care about being overcharged then it could probably go on as long as nobody cares.
The Verizon $1.99 billing could be over quickly if enough customers call in to complain and get a credit on their bill. Those manual transactions take time for CSRs to process, and customer service call volume is something that these companies track very closely. Even more so, if enough people call in they can't plead ignorance to the problem because they'll have a substantial amount of documented billing system activity that would come up in the course of an investigation.
