{"id":38623,"date":"2004-06-30T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2004-06-30T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2004\/06\/30\/fees-disguised-as-taxes\/"},"modified":"2004-06-30T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2004-06-30T07:00:00","slug":"fees-disguised-as-taxes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20040630-00\/?p=38623","title":{"rendered":"Fees disguised as taxes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It has become customary in the telecommunications industry  to quote a low price and then add half as much to it  in &#8220;fees&#8221;.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"q\"><p>    Regulatory Programs Fee. It sure sounds like a government tax.  <\/p>\n<p>  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.msnbc.msn.com\/id\/4972632\/\">  It isn&#8217;t<\/a>.  <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>  There&#8217;s been a new round of official-sounding line items on  telephone bills, which are really just ways for telephone companies  to raise rates while still being able to quote a low price.\n  <a href=\"http:\/\/investor.verizon.com\/2003annual\/proxy\/proxy16.shtml\">  The issue was raised as a shareholder proposal in Verizon&#8217;s  2004 proxy statement<\/a>.  The proposal starts out sounding very much like a crackpot  (perhaps because the proposer <strong>is<\/strong> a crackpot),  and the logic is rather twisted, but the underlying theme is  still there:  Price hikes disguised as official-sounding fees.<\/p>\n<p>  How I long for the European rule that the quoted price must  accurately represent the actual amount of money you will pay,  including taxes and fees.  None of this &#8220;quote a low price and then add a ton of mandatory  surcharges&#8221; nonsense.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It has become customary in the telecommunications industry to quote a low price and then add half as much to it in &#8220;fees&#8221;. Regulatory Programs Fee. It sure sounds like a government tax. It isn&#8217;t. There&#8217;s been a new round of official-sounding line items on telephone bills, which are really just ways for telephone companies [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-38623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>It has become customary in the telecommunications industry to quote a low price and then add half as much to it in &#8220;fees&#8221;. Regulatory Programs Fee. It sure sounds like a government tax. It isn&#8217;t. There&#8217;s been a new round of official-sounding line items on telephone bills, which are really just ways for telephone companies [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38623\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}