THE AVERAGE MAN VS. COX CABLE

For the last two decades, I've been at war with Cox Cable. It doesn't matter that this battle is mostly in my head and that Cox -- not surprisingly -- doesn't know we're fighting it. My frustration is still quite real, though, and I'm fed up. To give you an idea from where my anger arises, I need to take you back ...

My first exposure to this company's sleazy tactics came in the late eighties when I rented my first apartment in Isla Vista. Being relatively new to the whole living on my own thing, I did as you might expect and enabled all the appropriate utilities: gas, electricity, telephone, etc. A quick phone call to all these places, and my new pad started jumping to life. For me, though, no existence is quite whole without television, so Cox was high on my to-do list. "Okay," they said, "we'll send someone out." What? Can't you just flip it on? I mean, I already connected the cable from the wall to the TV. "Are you crazy," they implied, "we're not magicians." So, I paid $40 for some dude to (I'm not kidding) clip the ends off of all the cables and attach new ones. "You gonna have more than one TV," he asks? Um, yes (I should have lied). He then proceeds to take the already existing splitter out of the wall and attaches a cable for my second set. "We'll have to charge you for that." After he's done performing all of those useless tasks, he of course, calls headquarters to have them flip it on.

The second story I would like to tell you actually happened to a friend of mine in Las Vegas ... A few months ago, he decides to upgrade his whole entertainment system to the newest, fancy schmancy HD everything. So, the cable guy (also Cox) comes out to his home and sets the whole thing up. After the work is done, my friend looks at the bill and notices that he has been charged a cable box setup fee, a DVR setup fee, and an HD setup fee. You might see where I'm going with this ... THEY ARE ALL THE SAME DEVICE! You plug the cable into the box and then plug the box into the television. Voila! Geez, I'm surprised they didn't charge a setup fee for each channel.

I could go on and on, but the point is that the cable companies are out of control. And I'm certainly not the only person who thinks this. If you've been paying attention, the (very pro-business) F.C.C. of all things has been trying to reign them in. You see, there was this little agreement made many moons ago that once the cable companies reached 70% of US homes, the F.C.C. could start regulating them. Turns out that they've recently hit that magic number, but the cable companies hired their lobbying dogs, did some of that fuzzy math, and got a group of Republicans to kill the thing.

So, what does this mean for you and me? Firstly, Cox can continue to raise my rates at a much quicker pace than inflation without giving me any additional services (exactly as they've been doing over the last twenty years). I currently pay $110 a month for cable with no HD, no Internets access, and no phone. Sound fair to you? Secondly, they will not be forced to go where the world is going and look at "a la carte" services so that I can pick and choose the stations I want. Thirdly, they can continue to create these strange "tier" packages to maximize their profits at the expense of the consumer. Cox, for example, charges me $10 a month for HBO and justifies it by forcing me to receive 10 HBO channels. Never mind that I may have no desire to see Rock IV eight times in one month (seven maybe). There's a word for this type of behavior ... MONOPOLY.

I'd like to leave you with this somewhat humorous story from Studio Briefing:

Religious broadcasters have renewed their opposition to efforts by FCC Chairman Kevin Martin to require cable TV providers to offer programming on an "a la carte" basis. In a statement, the Faith and Family Broadcasting Coalition (FFBC), which lobbies on behalf of religious broadcasters, praised commission members who balked at efforts by Martin to strengthen the ability of the FCC to regulate cable TV under a controversial rule that would kick in when cable TV is available to 70 percent of U.S. households and when 70 percent of those households have subscribed to cable systems. Martin's changes, the FFBC said, "would have had a devastating effect on religious broadcasters." It quoted Colby May, director of the American Center for Law and Justice's Washington office as saying, "A per-channel charge would dramatically limit, if not kill, the availability of religious-based programming on cable."

Is it just me, or is their argument that "a la carte" programming is bad because -- if someone were forced to pay for religious-based programming -- they wouldn't?