330
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
330 points (95.8% liked)
Technology
59403 readers
2733 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm not sure it was false advertising, the product was called "UnContract" "Mobile One" not "eternity price lock forever plan", the customer can choose to not pay any more if they cancel their contract before they pay again after the current contract period ends (all contracts everywhere for everything in history are like this), if the details were in the faq that they could read before signing the deal, then that's the deal they signed. It's deceptive, maybe fraudulent, but I'm not sure it's false advertising.
tmoblie lawyer: we cannot force a price change midway through a current contract, which we refer to as "the plan". therefore we are not forcing the customer to pay a higher price at any time for their plan, though when one contract period ends, we may change the price, and the consumer can then decide whether they are willing to pay any higher price than their previous plans price, going forward.
that faq laying out the possibility of a price hike, and the expectation of compensation, means every word and punctuation can, and is being "lawyered"
Except the possibility to keep the current price is no longer available, therefore, the consumer does not have the option to continue paying the same price, ergo TMobile forced the customer to change the price they pay, either to a higher amount for the same contact or to 0 for no contact. The original advertisement stated that TMobile would never change the price a customer pays, but it directly forcing this change by not offering the same contact.
As you said. it's not false, but it is deceptive.
People should be reading the small print though, or in this case an FAQ.
There's a place for more strict regulations on advertising here though. You shouldn't be able to make out a product is one thing in the headline, then tell us it isn't further down the page.
agreed is sneaky and underhanded as seeks to deceive the customer
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't there already precident set in the 90s that EULAs do not have any holding in a court of law as a contract if the terms are labeled to be unrealistic? I swear someone sued microsoft because they did something in their EULA for Windows 95, and when it went to court, the judge said "yeah, fuck this...."
And the thing about precidents is, once they're established, courts generally tend to follow that precident, else it would mean that two similiar cases with similiar backgrounds were judged differently.