The FCC announced a $2.3 million fine against Comcast on Tuesday after confirming that the company had been billing customers for products and services they had never ordered. After calling the fine "the largest civil penalty assessed from a cable operator by the FCC," the federal agency's announcement detailed exactly how Comcast bilked customers—and new company practices that must be put into place as a result.
According to the FCC's Office of Media Relations, the agency had received "numerous complaints from consumers" about the issue of "negative option billing"—meaning, receiving charges for items that the customers had never affirmatively requested. (The FCC reminds readers that in the telecom world, this practice is known as "cramming.") The listed complaints revolve specifically around items related to cable TV service, including "premium channels, set-top boxes, and DVRs."
“Despite specifically declining service or equipment upgrades”
Though the FCC's statement didn't quote particular complaints or state how many the agency received, it described a range of unsavory reports from customers, including "being billed despite specifically declining service or equipment upgrades offered by Comcast," "having no knowledge of unauthorized charges until they received unordered equipment in the mail," and "expending significant time and energy to attempt to remove unauthorized charges from their bills and obtain refunds." (Ars has reached out to the FCC with questions about specific complaints and the number received; we will update this report if we receive a response.)
“It is basic that a cable bill should include charges only for services and equipment ordered by the customer—nothing more and nothing less,” Enforcement Bureau Chief Travis LeBlanc said in the statement. “We expect all cable and phone companies to take responsibility for the accuracy of their bills and to ensure their customers have authorized any charges.”
In addition to paying the fine, the FCC has ruled that Comcast must implement a "five-year compliance plan" effective immediately. The primary driver of that plan: Comcast must adopt "processes and procedures designed to obtain affirmative informed consent from customers prior to charging them for any new services or equipment." The fact that the FCC pointed out such an obvious business practice may mean that Comcast was unable to prove to the FCC that it had such a consent-affirmation mechanism in place.
Other elements of the compliance plan include order-confirmation letters that are no longer tucked into other bills, a no-cost ability for customers to block new services or equipment being added to accounts, a "standardized and expedient" update to Comcast's charge-dispute processes, and a block on Comcast sending accounts to collections or suspending service during the charge-dispute process.
The fine follows a 2015 notice from the FCC that requested complaints from cable and Internet customers en masse, essentially telling shoppers that their complaints were weak on their own but stronger in a giant, combined swell: "The collective data we receive helps us keep a pulse on what consumers are experiencing, may lead to investigations, and serves as a deterrent to the companies we regulate."Comcast issued a statement to Ars Technica:
We acknowledge that, in the past, our customer service should have been better and our bills clearer, and that customers have at times been unnecessarily frustrated or confused. That’s why we had already put in place many improvements to do better for our customers even before the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau started this investigation almost two years ago. The changes the Bureau asked us to make were in most cases changes we had already committed to make, and many were already well underway or in our work plan to implement in the near future.
Comcast's statement included links to reports of larger fines assessed to telecom companies by the FCC, but these were not charged specifically to cable-television providers. It also alleged that the FCC "found no problematic policy or intentional wrongdoing, but just isolated errors or customer confusion." When pressed about that phrasing, Comcast representatives clarified that "there was no finding or admission of liability in this Consent Decree."
Listing image by Alyson Hurt
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