Archive: June, 2010

I'm an infrequent international traveler - paying two college tuitions is a great cure for wanderlust - but I've done enough to realize that, once you leave the United States, cell phones and wireless data can be an absolute minefield.  So I was pleased to see that the FCC takes the problem seriously enough to weigh in with valuable advice on the first day of summer - probably because it's the agency that gets complaints when consumers get burned.

For now, I'm seeing the glass as half-full, since the new rules are light years ahead of where we were before the Fed and Congress finally recognized the need to impose any rules on the card companies' Wild West business model.  But I agree with him on this point: The actions today are another example of why the consumer financial protection agency that Congress is almost finished crafting is so important.

The key to consumer protection is the ability to respond quickly as market conditions and business models change.  As the financial collapse  made abundantly clear, today's financial innovation can too easily become tomorrow's consumer trap.

There's a debate playing out in Washington that is fascinating to watch even if the underlying issue isn't high on most consumers' radar. Suddenly, the loudest, nastiest,  most-business-bashing rhetoric isn't coming from any of the usual suspects. It's coming from corporate lobbying groups on opposite sides of an amendment to the Senate's version of financial reform: language that would force changes in how merchants, banks, and Visa and MasterCard share the costs and benefits of so-called interchange fees, a key part of the charges taken off the top when a consumer buys something with a credit or debit card rather than cash or a check.

The move against SBN was made possible because the FTC last year tightened its rules against robocalls, the prerecorded phone messages that enable a high-tech telemarketer to bait thousands of lines simultaneously, and then try to reel in the small percentage of consumers who bite.

Greg Caputo said he was going to Thursday's Phillies game, and wondered when the preseason announcement of an upgrade in service at the ballpark would finally come to fruition. Guy who sits next to me with the same partial season ticket plan is equally annoyed, Caputo wrote, while the people using Droid phones on the Verizon network around us have access to stats from other games, text messages, and email.