I'm with the ISPs on this, at least partway. Some of the fees ISPs charge aren't really fees at all, but rather pass-through taxes, set by ordinance and mandated into ISP bills through local franchise agreements. These aren't ISP fees at all; the ISPs don't control them, don't benefit from them, and presumably would rather they not exist at all.
Annoyingly, the point of sale for Internet connections isn't necessarily the municipality where installation happens, meaning that to give a complete record of these fees, ISPs need infrastructure to look them up by address. It's not the world's hardest IT problem, but it's a cost imposed on them by external actors, and those costs all get passed to consumers.
Yet they can put them on the bill each month, no problem? This is a specious line of reasoning, that it's too hard to list the fees, but easy to charge for them. Same lookup, written on the same damn bill. Not an extra cost.
It's a fundamental rule of fiscal responsibility to account for every penny in the bill.
Normally when a business has costs, they recoup them by charging an amount for their services that can pay their costs and leave them some margin. ISP around the US advertise one price and then tack on these... apparently special costs as separate line items. There's no good reason they should be allow to exclude them from the advertised price.
Somewhat related: Comcast recently called to try to trick me into moving from month to month to a 2 year contract with a $200+ cancellation fee for a piddly amount of savings monthly. If I wasn't reading the details I'd have fallen for it. They also still haven't replaced the faulty coax line at my current location that they said they would get to "soon", (before the pandemic,) after half a dozen phone calls and several tech visits. Their level of service is abysmally poor in any area without competition. They make a ton of money. It's an inexcusably bad situation. I feel very limited in where I can buy property because of the widespread local monopolies held by shit companies like Comcast.
> They're taxes that local governments are charging their residents, using Comcast as a bill collector.
Uh huh. But that's effectively the same as just charging the ISP per subscriber, the difference is all perception and inconvenience to the subscriber. Why don't we get line items for the property tax that businesses pay on every bill?
Annoyingly, the point of sale for Internet connections isn't necessarily the municipality where installation happens, meaning that to give a complete record of these fees, ISPs need infrastructure to look them up by address. It's not the world's hardest IT problem, but it's a cost imposed on them by external actors, and those costs all get passed to consumers.