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Verizon Bases $5 Fee To Not Publish Your Phone Number On 'Systems and IT' Costs

Posted by Soulskill on from the also-on-'give-us-your-money'-costs dept.

coondoggie writes "Let's say that for whatever reason, you'd rather your telephone number not be published. If you are a Verizon customer, that privacy privilege will cost you $5 a month. And how does Verizon justify such a significant fee for such an insignificant service? 'The cost charged to offer unlisted phone numbers is chiefly systems and IT based,' a media relations spokesman for the company tells Network World. (Asking the same question of online customer service elicited a predictably unenlightening response.) Sixty dollars a year to keep an unpublished number unpublished? Does that seem plausible?"

5 of 331 comments (clear)

  1. Revenue Stream by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's called "alternate revenue streams" and they will try to nickle&dime-XXL you for almost everything. A one-time charge would be plausible, but a MONTHLY fee? This is gauging. But... guess what? There's nothing you can do.

    1. Re:Revenue Stream by currently_awake · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Yes it does cost them $5/month. This is how much money they lose selling your name.

    2. Re:Revenue Stream by roman_mir · · Score: 3, Interesting

      There was no government regulation involved when the banks fucked up the economy.

      - so you do not consider over 100,000 regulations to be regulations? That's the number in financial, banking industry. By the way, it's funny in a sad way to see that you don't understand that FDIC, Fed, FHA, HUD, F&F, Patriot Act, etc. - all these things are regulations.

      Comcast is a separate story, AT&T was a huge gov't monopoly, which killed 3000 competitors to AT&T, gov't just shut them down in the beginning of the 20th century. Since then the communications infrastructure has been abysmal in USA, specifically because of that.

      The only single regulation that was removed by Clinton was Glass Steagall, but without the Fed, FDIC, HUD, FHA, F&F this wouldn't have been a problem. Glass Steagall was implemented to counteract the negative effects of the moral hazard created by the FDIC, which was a way to keep people using the banks during the Great Depression (also created by the Fed and Hoover and FDR policies of huge spending, bail outs, stimulus by the way).

      --
      You can't handle the truth.
  2. Old News by fm6 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    POTS vendors have always had this policy. It's stupid, but it's easy to circumvent. Since they let you publish the listing under any name you want, you make one up. When I had a landline, it was under "Gigo Hasp" (old IBM mainframe joke).

  3. Re:Money for nothing ...... by PT_1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    $60 a year for doing what? Nothing? Surely marking a number as unlisted in the subscriber database is a once-off 30 activity of at most 5 minutes. So who's being paid $720 an hour for doing it?

    I doubt it's even a 5 minute job. I work for a large telco in Europe. If a customer over here asks for their number not to be printed, we have to honour that request and we're not allowed (by law) to charge a cent for doing so. The phone directory is based on a database, which is linked to our customer care software. If a customer asks for their number to be removed from the phone book, a customer care agent clicks the button on their screen and the database is updated overnight. Factoring in a staff member's time, overheads for running the call centre etc., a call like this costs on average the equivalent of just over $4. Charging $60 per year is outrageous.