It’s the holiday season — and to celebrate it, Comcast has raised its modem rental rates. This tip-off comes from redditor Slayer0606 who noted the 25% increase in his monthly fee, from $8 to $10 a month. According to him, Comcast representatives defended the move by claiming he’d been notified of it in a previous bill.

Two things make that particularly disingenuous: First, Slayer0606, like most of us these days, pays bills online, typically by simply clicking “Pay bill” on a website. Notifications that aren’t prominently displayed on that website are therefore missed. Comcast may not specifically charge more for sending paper bills, but many companies do, and have taken steps to encourage users to stop receiving them.

The second problem is that the information is buried on page seven that’s only visible if you click through to view “Full bill.” Even the initial invoice and summary didn’t display the information. This is the kind of non-notification “notification” that’s deliberately designed to not be noticed, and Comcast’s protests that it’s delivering additional value in the form of capacity upgrades and other features are a further misdirect. Whatever the value of those capabilities in the long term, Comcast doesn’t ship out new modems that give end-users these functions automatically. Generally speaking, the only way to get an upgrade is to pester the company for one or to wait until the cable modem dies.

Ars Technica has cataloged a set of other price increases, from a Broadcast TV fee of $3.25 a month (up from $1.50) an increased “Downgrade of Service Fee” of $12.40 (up from $12.05) and an “Hourly Service Charge fee of $35.80 up from $33.20. These increases and the cable modem rental increase itself were partly offset by the decreased HBO charge, but the exact impact of the service charges will vary depending on what you buy and what market you’re in.

A business model based on bilking the customer

Plenty of people will argue that this is the customers’ fault for not reading the fine print on the bill, but this argument is flawed for a number of reasons. First, Comcast has the unilateral right to raise prices without allowing you, the end user, to cancel your contract. As such, the “contracts” we tend to get handed in the United States are one-sided agreements without alternative. The law enforces them as though they represent agreements between two equal parties when in reality, they’re incredibly consumer-hostile.

Second, the idea that anyone has time to sort through a 7-10 page bill when so many companies now push online-only billing is absurd. It’s an argument born from the fundamentally cynical premise that not only should we be locked into contracts we can’t change, but that it’s the responsibility of the consumer to monitor contracts they can’t actually change or enforce. Multiple redditors have threatened to report Comcast to the FCC and Better Business Bureau.

Ultimately what this reflects is the impunity with which Comcast can operate. Without serious competition in most markets, the company can raise its prices virtually at will. According to Forbes, Comcast earned between $275M and $300M per quarter on its rental fees. Raising the price $2 will nicely inflate their bottom line.

But hey — let’s approve that TWC merger. Surely it’ll fix things.

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