NPI to Comcast: Stop spamming us with unsolicited offers for service we don’t want

Edi­tor’s note: The fol­low­ing is an open let­ter to Com­cast CEO, Pres­i­dent, and Chair­man Bri­an Roberts from the North­west Pro­gres­sive Institute.

Dear Bri­an:

I am writ­ing to ask that Com­cast cease and desist from send­ing us fur­ther “lim­it­ed-time sav­ings vouch­ers” or oth­er solic­i­ta­tions for Com­cast Busi­ness service.

Since last sum­mer, we have received dozens of near­ly iden­ti­cal, mass-pro­duced unsigned and unso­licit­ed let­ters urg­ing us to “sign up for fast Inter­net, then add phone & TV for $34.90 more per month.”

For rea­sons we can­not fath­om, many of these let­ters have been show­ing up in pairs, with only slight vari­a­tions in the address. This is waste­ful and pointless.

We can only con­clude that you’ve been min­ing pub­lic records in order to gen­er­ate mail­ing lists of prospec­tive cus­tomers, and then not both­er­ing to fil­ter for dupli­cate names and address­es pri­or to print­ing up your solic­i­ta­tions. That would cer­tain­ly explain why we often have received pro­mo­tion­al offers two at a time.

But it gets worse.

See, Bri­an, the Think­space com­mu­ni­ty, which we at the North­west Pro­gres­sive Insti­tute call home, has Com­cast Busi­ness service.

Every com­pa­ny and non­prof­it with a pres­ence in the build­ing is thus already a cus­tomer of yours, whether they like it or not.

Should­n’t your mar­ket­ing and sales depart­ments know this? Should­n’t they be able to see that 8201 164th Avenue in Red­mond is already served by Comcast?

Were it up to me and my team, we’d choose the com­pe­ti­tion for every­thing: Inter­net, tele­vi­sion, and phone. Of all of the major mega­cor­po­ra­tions whose busi­ness prac­tices and pub­lic pol­i­cy posi­tions we intense­ly dis­like, Com­cast is at the top of the list, along with Wall Street banks like Bank of Amer­i­ca and JPMor­gan Chase and oil com­pa­nies like BP and ExxonMobil.

Here’s why we have no inter­est in being a Com­cast customer.

Com­cast ser­vice is unre­li­able and not a good value

Your com­pa­ny has become infa­mous for charg­ing very high prices for very poor ser­vice. This has been true in my own expe­ri­ence. Before ditch­ing Com­cast at home, I had to put up with all sorts of prob­lems, from slow chan­nel changes to repeat­ed errors when try­ing to watch movies or shows on demand.

My expe­ri­ence isn’t unique. Even peo­ple who have decid­ed to keep their Com­cast ser­vice, like Frank Cata­lano, have grum­bled about it.

Last week, across the lake in Seat­tle, Com­cast expe­ri­enced a major out­age, which result­ed in many busi­ness­es hav­ing to shut down oper­a­tions for the day and send home employ­ees. The out­age was­n’t Com­cast’s fault, but its han­dling of the inci­dent left a lot of Seat­tleites angry and frustrated.

Ridicu­lous­ly, Com­cast is requir­ing that impact­ed cus­tomers call in to receive a refund, instead of auto­mat­i­cal­ly cred­it­ing them.

In its Com­cast Con­fes­sions series, The Verge spoke with over a hun­dred Com­cast employ­ees and con­trac­tors in an attempt to under­stand why Com­cast ser­vice is so lousy. The Verge’s Adri­anne Jef­fries report­ed: “We heard the same sto­ries over and over again: cus­tomer ser­vice has been replaced by an obses­sion with sales, tech­ni­cians are under­staffed, tech sup­port is poor­ly trained, and the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions behe­moth is hob­bled by inter­nal fragmentation. ”

No won­der, then, that along with Time Warn­er Cable, which you are present­ly attempt­ing to acquire (an acqui­si­tion that a friend of ours likened to “traf­fic and can­cer join­ing forces”) you scored dead last in the Amer­i­can Con­sumer Sat­is­fac­tion Index’s 2014 Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions and Infor­ma­tion Report, a respect­ed sur­vey that asks tens of thou­sands of Amer­i­cans to rate their sat­is­fac­tion with prod­ucts and ser­vices they use in their every­day lives. And it’s not the first time, either.

Com­cast is bad at fix­ing billing mistakes

Woe to any cus­tomer who finds a prob­lem on their Com­cast bill and tries to get it cor­rect­ed. Not long ago, Ars Tech­ni­ca pub­lished an arti­cle telling the incred­i­bly dis­turb­ing sto­ry of Conal O’Rourke, a Price­wa­ter­house­C­oop­ers accoun­tant who found him­self fired from PwC after try­ing to get Com­cast to fix mis­takes on his bill.

Among the ini­tial billing mis­takes that O’Rourke tried to get cor­rect­ed after becom­ing a Com­cast cus­tomer in Feb­ru­ary of 2013:

• His name was incor­rect­ly spelled
• He was being charged for three addi­tion­al HD out­lets he did­n’t have
• He was charged for cable set-top box­es he nev­er activated

O’Rourke got nowhere over the phone, despite call­ing in repeat­ed­ly. So he went in to the local Com­cast store in his neigh­bor­hood of San Jose. An assis­tant store man­ag­er promised him Com­cast would take of him.

But his prob­lems only got worse. Over the next few months, his Com­cast Inter­net ser­vice repeat­ed­ly quit work­ing. Com­cast promised to send tech­ni­cians out to fix the prob­lems, but did­n’t. And then, one day, O’Rourke got home to dis­cov­er sev­er­al box­es con­tain­ing over $1,800 worth of equip­ment he had­n’t ordered.

Fed up, O’Rourke did what most rea­son­able peo­ple in his shoes would do: He went up the cor­po­rate food chain, hop­ing to talk to some­one with the pow­er to fix his prob­lems. But, after a con­ver­sa­tion with Com­cast’s con­troller Lawrence Sal­va, he found him­self in more trou­ble than ever.

Sal­va’s office found out that O’Rourke worked for Price­wa­ter­house­C­oop­ers — which con­sults for Com­cast. O’Rourke’s lawyer alleges that Sal­va’s office pro­ceed­ed to con­tact a part­ner at PwC, telling the part­ner that O’Rourke “had invoked his employ­ment with PwC in an attempt to some­how obtain lever­age in his nego­ti­a­tions with Comcast.”

(That’s from a let­ter sent by Com­cast by O’Rourke’s lawyer).

In Feb­ru­ary of 2014, O’Rourke was sub­ject­ed to an inter­nal ethics inves­ti­ga­tion. Less than two weeks lat­er, he was fired from PwC. He is now seek­ing com­pen­sa­tion and an apol­o­gy from Com­cast (Com­cast offered an apol­o­gy through its cor­po­rate blog, which O’Rourke and his lawyers found lack­ing.) O’Rourke told Ars that his research indi­cat­ed his expe­ri­ence was unfor­tu­nate­ly not that unusual:

I think they’re total­ly egre­gious… I think they’re the most uneth­i­cal, dis­hon­est bunch that I’ve ever encoun­tered. I would like to see them inves­ti­gat­ed for repeat­ed over­billing. It is a very com­mon occurrence.

In July 2014, O’Rourke sent a let­ter to Con­necti­cut Sen­a­tor Richard Blu­men­thal detail­ing his expe­ri­ence and dis­cussing Com­cast’s busi­ness practices.

Com­cast does­n’t deliv­er what it promises

Com­cast makes all sorts of claims in its mar­ket­ing and direct­ly to prospec­tive and active cus­tomers that it does not fulfill.

Con­sid­er the expe­ri­ence of Seth Mora­bito, a Con­sumerist read­er and tech­nol­o­gist. Last year, Seth bought a nice home in Kit­sap Coun­ty (which is not far from Wash­ing­ton’s major urban cen­ters) after hav­ing been assured twice by Com­cast rep­re­sen­ta­tives that it could and would be con­nect­ed to Com­cast’s network.

Sad­ly, when Seth tried to get his home wired, he ran into noth­ing but trou­ble. Ulti­mate­ly, he was told his dream home could not be con­nect­ed:

I don’t know where we go from here. I don’t know if there’s any kind of recourse. I do know that through­out this process, Com­cast has lied.

I don’t throw that word around light­ly or flip­pant­ly, I mean it sin­cere­ly. They’ve fed me false infor­ma­tion from the start, and it’s hurt me very bad­ly. This whole thing would have been avoid­ed if only Com­cast had said, right at the start, that they didn’t serve this address. Just that one thing would have made me strike this house off the list.

I don’t know exact­ly how much mon­ey I’m going to lose when I sell, but it’s going to be substantial.

Three months of equi­ty in a house isn’t a lot of mon­ey com­pared to sell­ers fees, excise tax­es, and oth­er mov­ing expenses.

Seth is hard­ly the only one who has been let down by Comcast.

Com­cast is hard to break up with

As AOL vice pres­i­dent Ryan Block doc­u­ment­ed in a wide­ly dis­sem­i­nat­ed audio clip post­ed to Sound­Cloud, Com­cast does not make it easy for cus­tomers who are dis­sat­is­fied to sev­er their rela­tion­ship with Com­cast. Many Amer­i­cans have unhap­pi­ly dis­cov­ered that Com­cast con­sid­ers itself akin to the Hotel Cal­i­for­nia: You can check out any­time you like, but you can nev­er leave (with props to The Eagles).

The Blocks are not the only ones who have been treat­ed this way, con­trary to your claims that “the way in which our rep­re­sen­ta­tive com­mu­ni­cat­ed with them is unac­cept­able and not con­sis­tent with how we train our cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tives.” As Busi­ness­week report­ed in a July 18th arti­cle titled, “That Com­cast Cus­tomer Ser­vice Rep Was­n’t Going Rogue”:

It turns out the rep wasn’t going rogue, accord­ing to Lau­ren Bruce, a for­mer Com­cast cus­tomer account exec­u­tive. “Unless a cus­tomer was mov­ing, we were encour­aged to use reten­tion tech­niques,” says Bruce, who start­ed work­ing at Insight Com­mu­ni­ca­tions in Lafayette, Ind., in 2005. The com­pa­ny was lat­er acquired by Comcast.

“If some­one is say­ing, ‘screw my ser­vice, I hate you,’ you would say, ‘Hey, do you want phone too?’” recalls Bruce, who left Com­cast in 2009. She declines to say where she is cur­rent­ly working.

Bruce says that Com­cast employ­ees were not asked to fol­low a script, but were trained to respond in a giv­en way in cer­tain sce­nar­ios. For exam­ple, if some­one states that they are dis­sat­is­fied with ser­vice, the cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tive must first ask why they are dis­sat­is­fied before pro­ceed­ing with the request. The goal is always to retain cus­tomers or con­vince them to buy a high­er-priced service.

Employ­ees work­ing in your cus­tomer reten­tion depart­ment are clear­ly oper­at­ing under direc­tives from the top — in oth­er words, instruc­tions from you.

Com­cast oppos­es net neutrality

At NPI, we val­ue dig­i­tal free­dom high­ly. It’s some­thing that mat­ters a great deal to us. Before NPI exist­ed phys­i­cal­ly or legal­ly, it exist­ed as an idea on the Web. Like oth­er net­roots orga­ni­za­tions and tech star­tups, NPI’s roots are virtual.

If the Inter­net hadn’t been invent­ed, NPI would nev­er have come into being. The same goes for the rest of the net­roots com­mu­ni­ty. We are fierce believ­ers in net neu­tral­i­ty — the idea that Inter­net ser­vice providers such as Com­cast should be required to treat all traf­fic equal­ly — and we  strong­ly sup­port net neu­tral­i­ty’s trans­for­ma­tion from prin­ci­ple to well-enforced law.

Com­cast regret­tably has a his­to­ry of oppos­ing net neu­tral­i­ty and, along with Ver­i­zon Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, active­ly engag­ing in lit­i­ga­tion to over­turn Fed­er­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mis­sion rules designed to pre­vent Com­cast and oth­er ISPs from turn­ing the Inter­net into a sec­ond incar­na­tion of cable television.

In 2007, Com­cast was caught throt­tling Bit­Tor­rent traf­fic using pack­et forg­ing in vio­la­tion of net neu­tral­i­ty prin­ci­ples.

The Fed­er­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mis­sion sub­se­quent­ly ordered Com­cast to alter its net­work man­age­ment prac­tices in a land­mark 2008 order. Com­cast pro­ceed­ed to fight the order in court, argu­ing that the FCC had over­stepped its authority.

We regard Com­cast as a seri­ous threat to Inter­net freedom.

Com­cast often blocks legit­i­mate email to its subscribers

Last sum­mer, we noticed that after send­ing out a new issue of our e‑newsletter, The Ever­green Con­nec­tion, we were get­ting an unusu­al­ly high num­ber of bounces back. After some inves­ti­ga­tion, we dis­cov­ered that Com­cast had black­list­ed the SMTP serv­er we use to send email, mean­ing that deliv­ery of our newslet­ter to our sup­port­ers with @comcast.net email address­es was being blocked.

We care­ful­ly fol­low best prac­tices for send­ing email, so we were puz­zled, but the serv­er we use is shared with many oth­er indi­vid­u­als and organizations.

We sub­mit­ted a request to get off the black­list and this was duly processed by Com­cast, but we were nev­er giv­en an expla­na­tion as to why Com­cast black­list­ed the  serv­er that we use in the first place. We sug­gest that Com­cast learn to com­bat spam more intel­li­gent­ly and effec­tive­ly so legit­i­mate email can get through.

Oth­ers have also had sim­i­lar prob­lems with Com­cast over the years. Here’s one exam­ple. Here’s anoth­er. And here’s still anoth­er.

Com­cast is anti-union

Com­cast has a his­to­ry of say­ing one thing and doing anoth­er when it comes to respect­ing labor rights. In com­mu­ni­ty after com­mu­ni­ty, includ­ing here in the Pacif­ic North­west, Com­cast has tried to break unions and pre­vent employ­ees from form­ing unions, pre­sum­ably so that it can enjoy more pow­er over its employ­ees and get away with pay­ing them less and offer­ing few­er benefits.

This has unfor­tu­nate­ly been going for years; the NW Labor Press wrote about it 2004 and rep­re­sen­ta­tives of Reclaim the Media made it a focal point of their tes­ti­mo­ny on a pro­posed fran­chise agree­ment in Seat­tle the same year.

Com­cast is poor­ly governed

Com­cast has repeat­ed­ly been giv­en low marks by watch­dogs for its cor­po­rate gov­er­nance practices.

In 2010, the Cor­po­rate Library, which has since merged with Gov­er­nance Met­rics to form GMI Rat­ings, grad­ed Com­cast an “F”, in part because you, Bri­an, serve not only as chief exec­u­tive offi­cer but also as pres­i­dent and chair­man, and part­ly also because you’ve had direc­tors who were your employ­ees, mak­ing effec­tive over­sight of you and your exec­u­tive team dif­fi­cult, if not impossible.

GMI has also tagged Com­cast with its “Very High Con­cern” rat­ing in a more recent risk assess­ment due to exces­sive exec­u­tive pay.

Of course, since you’re the CEO, pres­i­dent, and chair­man of the com­pa­ny, and the board of Com­cast rub­ber stamps your requests, you’re in charge of set­ting your own pay. And you cer­tain­ly pay your­self a lot: In 2013, the Philadel­phia Inquir­er report­ed that you make near­ly $30 mil­lion a year. That’s more than seven hun­dred times what the typ­i­cal Amer­i­can work­er makes.

You’re eas­i­ly one of the high­est paid CEOs on the con­ti­nent. What’s more, you’ve ensured you not only have con­trol over the board and man­age­ment of Com­cast, but also the pow­er to hire and fire the board: you own a hun­dred per­cent of Com­cast’s class B com­mon stock, which con­trols 33.3% of vot­ing power. 

Your lead­er­ship, or lack there­of, has sad­ly turned Com­cast into a poster child for poor cor­po­rate governance.

Com­cast wants to be a monop­oly, everywhere

Com­cast has a track record of being more con­cerned with expan­sion and con­sol­i­da­tion than doing right by its cus­tomers and employ­ees, or pro­vid­ing speedy broad­band access to res­i­dences and busi­ness­es com­pa­ra­ble to what oth­er devel­oped coun­tries like Japan and South Korea have.

For over two decades, under you, Com­cast has been engaged in a long empire-build­ing cam­paign, gob­bling up small­er cable providers and branch­ing into new mar­kets in your quest to become a monop­oly. In the 1990s and ear­ly 2000s, Com­cast pur­chased Maclean Hunter’s Amer­i­can divi­sion, the cable oper­a­tions of E.W. Scripps Com­pa­ny, Greater Philadel­phia Cable­vi­sion, and AT&T Broadband.

In 2004, Com­cast unsuc­cess­ful­ly attempt­ed to buy The Walt Dis­ney Com­pa­ny for $54 bil­lion, hop­ing to get its hands on Dis­ney’s lucra­tive ESPN divi­sion.

NPI opposed this acqui­si­tion, which would have eas­i­ly made Com­cast the biggest media con­glom­er­ate in the world. Com­cast’s offer was rebuffed by Dis­ney’s board of direc­tors and ulti­mate­ly withdrawn.

With­in the next three years, Com­cast pur­chased MGM and Unit­ed Artists in a part­ner­ship with Sony. Com­cast also pur­chased cable providers Susque­han­na Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and Patri­ot Media, and par­tic­i­pat­ed in a major acqui­si­tion of Adel­phia Cable with Time Warn­er Cable.

In 2009, Com­cast announced its inten­tion to acquire a major­i­ty stake in NBCU­ni­ver­sal. Despite the oppo­si­tion of NPI and many oth­er orga­ni­za­tions, the acqui­si­tion was approved by the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, and it closed in 2011. Com­cast sub­se­quent­ly bought out Gen­er­al Elec­tric’s stake in NBCUniversal.

More recent­ly, Com­cast reached an agree­ment to buy Time Warn­er Cable in a $45.2 bil­lion megadeal, announced last Feb­ru­ary. Com­cast and Time Warn­er Cable are the nation’s two largest cable providers, dwarf­ing their rivals.

NPI strong­ly oppos­es this merg­er and is ask­ing the Depart­ment of Jus­tice and the Fed­er­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mis­sion to block it on antitrust grounds. We’re not the only ones who oppose your attempt to buy TWC, I might add. Accord­ing to a poll by Con­sumer Reports, so do most Amer­i­cans.

In con­clu­sion…

I hope I’ve suc­ceed­ed in explain­ing why we are not inter­est­ed in doing busi­ness with Com­cast. Not only do you not share our val­ues, prin­ci­ples, and pol­i­cy direc­tions, you are active­ly work­ing against what we believe in.

To top it off, you’re dis­re­spect­ful towards your work­ers, cus­tomers, and even indi­vid­u­als and firms who you don’t have an estab­lished rela­tion­ship with. This snail mail spam we’re get­ting del­uged with is a per­fect exam­ple of that.

Please for­ward this mes­sage to a sub­or­di­nate who can ensure we are per­ma­nent­ly exclud­ed from all future mar­ket­ing and sales cam­paigns. We do not want to receive any more solic­i­ta­tions or pro­mo­tion­al offers from Comcast.

Sin­cere­ly,

Andrew Vil­leneuve
Exec­u­tive Director
North­west Pro­gres­sive Institute