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> To top it off providers like Exxon Mobile in particular structure their sales

That's one way to put it.
http://www.ucan.org/blog/gasoline_autos/gas_prices/gas_hogwash_it_all_about_supply_and_demand (how it works)

> If I were that guy I would make the gas prices as low as I possibly could, even if it butted up against Exxon's bottom line and forced me into $0.09 a gallon profit just to drag everyone else's prices down.

Do you remember the Los Angeles owner who's supplier cut him off for doing just that? (I can't find a link to the old story, but it was a featured report on NBC in Los Angeles a few years back) - I believe the current strategy is that a retailer is attacked legally, then disciplined by suppliers, then undercut. Big Oil always wins.

Any links you can find regarding oil companies running out the owners who attempt to subvert their price fixing, tend to disappear. This is real conspiracy theater stuff. Most link you will come up with are fringe/kook sites, but I think you would be able to dig up real evidence using some facts gathered from them (filtering the noise is the problem). Now here are some links, annotated as accurately as possible from a once-over. These few pieces took entirely too long to find as it is.

http://www.nuwireinvestor.com/articles/rural-gas-station-forced-to-close-due-to-rising-prices-57051.aspx (editorial?,no substantiation that I could see)
http://www.firingsquad.com/news/siteseeingarticle.asp?searchid=576&up=2&filterLevel=1&page=1 (no substantiation)
http://www.rickross.com/reference/rama_behera/rama_behera42.html (kook, no substantiation)

This isn't my bag, it's just something I accepted a long time ago. There are more important issues to focus on imo.

As best as I can trace their history, it looks like they come from the generic consumer-advocacy nonprofit space. I believe they were set up in the 1990s as a project of the Utility Consumers' Action Network, a San-Diego-based organization that mainly distributes information about utility services to the general public, as well as advocating for public-friendly policies. One of the utilities they traditionally monitored were the phone companies, and with the rise of the internet in the 1990s, they started collecting and distributing information about ISPs, and more generally some information about how to use the internet without getting scammed/etc. Seems to have later spun off into an independent or semi-independent group.

Really think you'll win a suit for "dropped calls"? Still going to keep that carrier as you sue them? Rather, think they'll keep you? If the answer is "No." to either of the latter questions or if all you succeed in doing is getting out of your contract, that leaves you sans a cell phone unless you're in an area with overlapping coverage from multiple carriers...something that monopolies are intended to prevent.

Heck, you miss out on a lot of profit if you have competition...hence the carriers gobbling each other up.

Oh, but you can. ;)

http://roaminghack.blogspot.com/
http://www.ucan.org/telecommunications/wireless/how_to_cancel_your_cell_phone_contract

I am in the process of getting off of Bell Canada and none too soon. I moved within Calgary, and the area I am in has poor coverage, so the phone drops calls continuously. After calling Bell to complain about the coverage, even though the coverage map says my area of the city is good, they said that I couldn't quit them since I didn't get their permissions to move (huh???), and its my fault the phone works periodically.
Anywho, I asked to get a supervisor and he got me off the rest of the contract and heading over to a new provider (http://www.windmobile.ca/) in the new year, and their rates are fantastic.... just hope they don't treat the customers like crap.

Play the fools at their own game.

Print one of these out and keep it by the phone:
Anti-Telemarketing Script
Anti-Telemarketing Script
Anti-Telemarketing Script

It has happened many times with wireless modem cards (3G/GPRS) - not

£7000 Charge For Useage When Sim NOT In Use

case #1.

case #2

other cases
(Has anyone ever seen a $48,797.09 phone bill from ATT ????)

To summarize, its all the same circular issues:
  Lack of competition, stupid people willing to pay extremely high demand and not seek quality, and rediculous lock-in contracts which most people don't have the common sense to know how to get out of (there are many ways). Most consumers don't even know the gov't passed a law some years back to make it legal to unlock your phone and yet people willingly let themselves stay locked in. Not to mention you can use roaming to cancel your plan without fees or cancel due to them changing the plan without your authorization (a letter doesn't count as an "okay, go ahead").
  The next problem is that even with such things, most providers have no competition, and still manage to lock people in due to stupidity. There's a lack of choice and excess of charges. Remember that USF charge? People are still being charged for that under a different name. (cnet news.com link)

Yes.
I can verify that there is such a law.
Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) of 1991.
It's handled the rare call I get. I have not followed up by suing,
but I did develop a process for logging the calls and response or lack of response.
http://www.ucan.org/members/ucanmembersonly/gifts4 members/takebackyourphone/letter2.html
is a useful form letter.
The federal do not call list is working pretty well for me. I was on the state (Indiana) list, and it turned out they weren't just blocking the calls I didn't want, but were also blocking calls I did want.
Getting off the list was a hassle, took an hour and 8 phone calls. The people who will put you -on- the list don't have the ability to take you off, so I had to hunt down the bureaucrat in charge.
Ordinarily a scam like that would be reported to the attorney general's office, but this -was- the attorney general's office. If I didn't want any calls at all, I know how to do that - unplug the phone.
Overall, do not call list is a good thing, from the consumer end. It was implemented badly in my state.
I wouldn't want to be on the other end - a small business with an occasional need to call somebody.
That the government wants to sell you the list of people they don't want you to call is a good tip-off the thing's a scam.

Sterling does mention that CA's energy usage is well below peak summer usage, but it bears repeating. The "shortage" is totally artificial, with generating companies shutting down generating capacity for "maintainance" at an unprecedented rate. Ever seen "Chinatown"? Remember the "water shortage" caused by deliberate dumping of reserviors into the ocean? Same deal here.

What we have here is a choice example of what happens when regulated industries get to write their own regulations by proxy.

-Isaac

The California House and Senate have passed legislation to deregulate the state's electric industry and to force California ratepayers and taxpayers to pay $27 billion to bail out the state's three investor-owned utilities. The measure represents a major victory for the utility industry and Wall Street, and a major setback for consumers and local communities, who face a decade of utility bill surcharges and restrictions that will prevent most Californians from getting access to competitively priced power.

The bill passed unanimously in both the Assembly and Senate. But many parties feel blindsided after expeting the bill to die. Although the $27 billion bailout made in the bill bill compares to the Savings and Loan crisis in sheer dollar volume, it received little press coverage the following day other than reports of a promised ten percent rate reduction for residents and small businesses.

The Bill, allegedly giving customers a "choice" about electricity suppliers, contains provisions which lock residents and small businesses with the monopoly utilities until 2002. Beyond 2002 the Bill adds hurdles that customers must jump before leaving the monopoly, making it likely that only a few will benefit even then.

The California law requiring competition for electric service by January 1998 will lead to little meaningful competition for the small business or residential customer during 1998.

The report, compiled after a 26-day survey of 132 electric service providers registered with California Public Utilities Commission, will serve as the first of an on-going evaluation of the electric market.

Of the 132 companies contacted:

- 20% of the registered companies are not providing service at all;
- 17% of the companies plan to provide service exclusively to business customers;
- 34% of the companies are difficult to contact and did not return UCAN's' phone calls (we called each provider at least two times).
- 21% (28 in total) companies are offering electric service to residential customers in California.

Of the 28 companies that are providing service to residential customers:

- 32% of the companies have no information on planned rates;
- 26% of the companies have viable service offers;
- 74% of the companies have questionable or extremely questionable service offers;
- 18% of the companies are offering "green" power only

But in California, Pennsylvania, Illinois and other state legislatures, consumer and environmental interests have so far been routed by utility lobbyists.

What galls California consumer groups most is AB1890's $28.5 billion stranded-cost bailout, much of which is for PG&E's Diablo Canyon reactors and Southern California Edison's San Onofre nuclear plant. "The manufacturers cut a backroom deal granting themselves preferential rates and giving the utilities a massive nuclear bailout, plus all sorts of corporate welfare, before the public had the slightest idea of what was going on," says Dan Berman, an energy expert and co-author of Who Owns the Sun?

The legislature's package contains no funding for consumer advocacy groups, but it does allow a staggering $89 million for industry advertising.

With California as a model, the pro-utility tide at the state level has thus far been overwhelming. "AB1890 was a mugging," says Charlie Higley, a senior energy analyst with Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy Project. "Then Pennsylvania was a mugging. Massachusetts was a mugging. The industry just owns too many state legislatures."

Representative Tom DeLay of Texas last year [1997?] proposed what some call the "Enron Bill," which would ban stranded costs from being passed along altogether, a position shared by the right-wing, "free market" Heritage Foundation. Enron had bitterly opposed stranded costs as a barrier to competition in California. But then it bought Oregon's Portland Gas & Electric, which wants a bailout for its failed Trojan reactor. Demonstrating the complexity of cross-interests, observers note that "suddenly Enron's attack on stranded costs has been muted."

An epic $30 million-plus California electoral war over billions in utility subsidies has bitterly divided the national environmental community.

It also handed the state's three dominant utilities -- Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric -- some $28.5 billion to subsidize capitalinvestments in generators unable to produce electricity cheap enough to sell competitively in a market increasingly dominated by inexpensive natural gas. In the California market, the investments were concentrated in two nuclear reactors at San Onofre, between San Diego and Los Angeles, and two more at Diablo Canyon, outside San Luis Obispo. According to their owners, these plants would almost certainly shut down in the face of cheaper juice coming from generators powered by methane.

[Q: What is the current status of these generators?]

"Prop. 9 voids the bond sale on which the phony rebate is based," says Gunther. "It ends the stranded cost rip-off. It demands the utilities compete on an even playing field, which they obviously don't want to do." Prop. 9 also has the support of the Sierra Club, Consumer's Union and the League of Women Voters.

According to campaign filings, the utilities have already raised almost $30 million to defeat Prop. 9, and have lined up some 2,000 organizations, including industrial and retail trade organizations, chambers of commerce, both major parties, most elected officials, the state's major unions and many of its civic and ethnic coalitions as well as certain environmental groups. "They've called in every favor they've bought over many years of carefully giving out donations," says Gunther. "They've gone all out."

Prop. 9's supporters have raised well under $500,000, and Gunther predicts the utilities will "outspend us 100 to 1, maybe more. It shows how much they stand to gain."

"The utilities have spent so much now the only thing they might prove is you can buy a referendum with unlimited money," says Hauter.