Verizon To Keep Charging Controversial Fee Despite $100 Million Settlement - Sla...

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  Agreed. In a sane legal system agreeing to a $100M payout would imply that you're admitting wrongdoing. The shareholders should be livid.

  • by NFN_NLN ( 633283 ) on Monday January 15, 2024 @04:05PM (#64161017)

    The firm has seen strong growth in connections in recent years, reporting over 143 million wireless retail connections in 2022, alongside almost 9 million fixed broadband connections. In addition, Verizon has been ranked as the most valuable telecom brand worldwide.

    At $3 per customer they bring in $429M but pay out $100M. The shareholders are happy.
    It's the customers that should be pissed.

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    Not defending Verizon, but there are other reasons than guilt that a company would settle. One being the cost of litigation. The other being potential disclosure of secrets, documents, etc. And to be clear, that doesn't mean the company is necessarily trying to hide something nefarious. It could just be future plans for expansion, or the like. If the class-action cared enough about proving the fees were wrong, they could have opted to go forward and not settle.

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    Not necessarily. If Verizon could present an argument that the combined costs of litigation plus what the expected cost of a loss (even if improbable) would exceed a $100 million settlement, then the shareholders should be in favor of management pursuing that course of action.
    
    There are likely people who will plead guilty to something as part of a deal created by prosecutors even though they are innocent of any wrong doing, simply because the possibility exists that they could be convicted of the crime in

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      if A times B times C is less than X, we dont do a recall

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  Google says they have 143M wireless customers. If they charge them $3.30 a month then this settlement cost them......6 days of having this surcharge. Sounds like a win, they can get sued for a similar amount 4 times a month every month forever and still come out ahead.

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    Google was trying to break in on residential internet access and they ran into problems with pole access and local jurisdictions as well as the local telco monopoly already (which is a whole different can of worms).

    The issue with residential internet is that like your power and water it is a Natural Monopoly [wikipedia.org] and our failure to accept that fact has led to those problems.

    Even now I can see the wireless connectivity drifting towards that direction. Yes a company like Google can set up more towers and more ant

• It's legal because we (the collective across the U.S. we) don't vote for enough of the type of politicians willing to make it not legal. That means we get this.

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    And thus...

    (Remember that this November.)

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  I worked for telecom firms for several decades and saw the FCC routinely granting authorization for the many myriad fees that the Big 3 and everyone else added to the bill. Telco Recovery Charge used to be called Bill Service Fee and was pitched to FCC as necessary to pay for maintenance of the automation infrastructure, e.g. the computers and data centers. The name was changed because customers grew upset knowing they were being charged to print a bill for mailing, and then were still being charged when th