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| Class action lawsuit In my opinion this will go on until some well-heeled law firm starts a class action lawsuit against Comcast, Charter, and any other company that does this sort of bundling.
You can't really compare this to other industries (such as insurance companies that offer multi-car discounts) for the simple reason that if those other companies have obnoxious terms that you don't agree with, you can search for a competitor. Another thing with regard to multi-car insurance discounts is that you're not being forced to buy two different products to get the discount. This would be more like saying you have to buy homeowners insurance and auto insurance from the same company to get a discount - well, what if you have a home but don't drive, or you drive but live in an apartment? You might not need one of those kinds of insurance (granted some companies may in fact offer discounts that way, but you always have to option to deal with one that doesn't). A multi-car discount, on the other hand, would be like saying your first 50 cable TV channels are $40 and for 50 more channels you pay only $5 or $10 more - it's just more of the same product. But broadband Internet and cable TV are two DIFFERENT products - not everyone who watches TV wants Internet access, and not everyone who wants broadband needs Cable TV (they may get all the TV they want from an antenna on the roof, for example).
So in my opinion, forcing people to buy two unrelated products or pay a premium rate goes over the line in any case, but especially when people don't have any choice of providers (as many people who have cable broadband do not, because the phone companies have been so pokey about implementing DSL - and anyway, they are just as bad in that they generally require people to have basic dial tone from them in order to get DSL, unless you go with a business-grade DSL service). So the consumer is getting shafted, and what surprises me is that none of the attorneys that specialize in class-action lawsuits seem to have picked up on this yet.
If anyone has even a little bit of legal background, maybe you could consider something like this. At the very least, you could go to a web site like »www.bigclassaction.com/ and enter a complaint (you can use a form at »www.bigclassaction.com/submit_form.html to do so - but please understand that I only found this page by doing a Google search on class action lawsuits, so I don't know anything at all about the folks running this page). In case you're wondering why I don't do this, the biggest reason is that I'm not a customer of any of these companies and therefore wouldn't have "standing" to be part of such a suit. | |
rody_40
join:2002-04-14
Quakertown, PA | they havent picked up on it because they wouldnt have a case. they dont miss much and this isnt anything new its just new to at@t broadband users. comcast subscribers had tryed starting class action law suits last year and everything else being discussed only to find out there is nothing wrong with what comcast is doing. if you dont like it simply dont subscribe to the service. simple as that | |
| said by rody_40:
they havent picked up on it because they wouldnt have a case. they dont miss much and this isnt anything new its just new to at@t broadband users. comcast subscribers had tryed starting class action law suits last year and everything else being discussed only to find out there is nothing wrong with what comcast is doing. if you dont like it simply dont subscribe to the service. simple as that
How would you know that they don't have a case when it hasn't even gone to court? Right now we are simply stating personal opinions, and in my opinion there's at least a 50-50 chance that this sort of lawsuit would be successful, for the simple reason that many users simply don't have the option to not subscribe to the service if they need broadband (of course you could argue that no one "needs" broadband, but I think you are going to find that as time goes by, Internet service becomes more and more considered a functional necessity of life, much like telephone service, whereas cable TV service will always be considered "entertainment" and therefore not a necessity. Anyway, that's one of the reasons you can't be sure how a court might rule, but if you can demonstrate that children need Internet access to not be seriously disadvantaged compared to their classmates - and that's not a difficult case to make at all - then you may well be able to convince a court that Internet service is a necessity that requires far more oversight in regard to price regulation).
Also, while other class action lawsuits have been filed against Comcast, I don't think many have been decided yet. For example, there is a pending lawsuit based on the assertion that "Approximately one million Comcast Internet customers had their Web surfing habits tracked by Comcast earlier this year. Comcast admitted that for a period of six weeks it had been recording information such as the IP (Internet protocol) address of customers' computers as well as Web pages they visited, but discontinued the practice following news reports and customer complaints" (see »www.bigclassaction.com/class_act···ast.html and/or »zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-923285.html ).
One thing we all know is that there are no guarantees in the law. This is the type of case where even various circuits around the country could disagree with each other, and the case could potentially wind up at the supreme court.
All I'm saying is that I'm just surprised that none of the law firms that specialize in class action lawsuits have looked into this. To me, this seems to be a much bigger deal that six weeks of tracking what web sites their customers visited (although I'm not minimizing the notion that it was wrong of Comcast to do that). | |
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