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Ad Board To Comcast: Stop Claiming You Have the 'Fastest Internet' (arstechnica.com)
The National Advertising Division (NDA) said on Monday that Comcast should stop claiming that its Xfinity service delivers the "fastest Internet in America," adding that the carrier should also discontinue some ads where it claims to offer the "fastest in-home Wi-Fi." ArsTechnica reports: For its fastest Internet claim, Comcast relied on crowdsourced data from the Ookla Speedtest application. An "award" provided by Ookla to Comcast relied only on the top 10 percent of each ISP's download results. "Although Xfinity offers a variety of speeds at a range of prices and tiers, Comcast's advertising does not limit its claims to a particular tier," the NAD's announcement said. "NAD determined that the claims at issue in both print and broadcast advertising reasonably conveyed a message of overall superiority -- that regardless of which speed tier purchased by a consumer, in a head-to-head comparison, Xfinity would deliver faster speeds." Though one methodology might be reliable for one purpose, "it may not be sufficient substantiation for advertising claims made in a different context," the NAD said. Ookla's methodology "wasn't a good fit for the purposes of substantiating Comcast's overall superior speed performance claim that 'Xfinity delivers the fastest Internet in America,'" the NAD also said.
To be the fastest internet in America, you have to provide the fastest internet in America. Just one counter example is enough to discredit the claim. If you are going to argue semantics where size of area served is taken into account, than add that qualifier to the claim!
The last thing I want is every ISP commercial followed by 25 seconds of a guy reciting disclaimers like we are at with pharmaceutical ads. Fucking lawyers.
Right. We should all just trust what our corporate betters tell us. After the all, they're richer and smarter than us, so they must know better than anyone, especially dirty government regulators, what's best for us. Advertising shouldn't have to truthful, just truthy. Right?
Fucking dim-witted Rand fan boys.