paulnumbers wrote:It sounds very unreasonable, I suggest you cease giving them your custom.
And that sounds like a canned armchair response to something that is nuanced and complicated - not least by the deliberate tampering with technical offerings by the networks to make 'consumer choice' a marketing gimmick rather than reality.
I don't have any issue with companies making a profit. I don't have any issue with shareholders and management getting decent remuneration/returns for well run companies.
I do however object to being taken for a mug by supposedly 'competitive' businesses that have a very vested interest in skewing things in their favour often by colluding with the competition.
I remember reading a book once that outlined how when the initial auctions for mobile spectrum took place in the UK the selling side (the Govt.) had to employ game theorists as they worked out the networks were price signalling to each other in code to stop it being a true highest bidder scenario.
Now you could argue that would have helped consumers through lower operating costs - the problem is they will apply the same tactics to any situation they can get away with to improve their net margins across the board.
The easiest people to fleece are consumers as 99% are clueless about the ripoffs and those that are aware can do very little about it unless they want to get involved in lengthy class/group action legal proceedings (which do happen) - or we can all rely on regulators and legislation to protect us from overly predatory behaviour.
I don't think anyone is advocating some ridiculous rainbow socialist Valhalla - just an acceptance that theoretical economic arguments like 'free markets' always leading to the best outcomes are fundamentally flawed - like much else in economics which why there is so much disagreement within it as an academic discipline. (As a social science- not a hard science ...
).