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May 6th, 2013

Consumer policy in telecoms: making all relevant information available is far from guaranteeing informed consumers

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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Blog Admin

May 6th, 2013

Consumer policy in telecoms: making all relevant information available is far from guaranteeing informed consumers

0 comments

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

claire-milne2-150x150The increasing convergence of services, devices and content leads to a more complex digital market that affects both consumers and telecom providers. In this post, Claire Milne focuses on ideas about consumers and market transparency in the current telecom sector. Based on recent consumer reports and consultations, the author suggests that the increasing complexity in the telecoms market has led to more confused rather than empowered consumers.

By now it’s well understood that successful competitive markets depend crucially on engaged, active consumers. Regulators around the world are used to upholding the twin notions of consumer empowerment (enabling informed consumers to exercise choice) and consumer protection (minimising harmful side-effects of competitive markets for consumers). Both these notions in turn rely on “market transparency”. This is generally understood as the availability to consumers of all the information that they might need about products and services, the terms on which these are provided, and what to do when things go wrong.

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Photo credit: splityarn via photopin cc

It’s a traditional tenet of consumer policy and law that markets should be transparent. But what this should mean in practice is rarely spelled out, and even more rarely tested. The increasing complexity and technical nature of communications markets means that merely making all relevant information available is far from guaranteeing informed consumers. In fact, it may just lead to confused consumers, who are prone to making wrong decisions; or fatigued consumers, who opt out of comparison shopping. A recent Canadian Supreme Court decision (reported in an EU Consumer Consultative Group Opinion on consumer vulnerability, of interest in its own right) suggests that the traditional notion of the average consumer as “someone who is reasonably well informed and reasonably observant and circumspect” is outdated, and should be replaced by “someone who is credulous and inexperienced and takes no more than ordinary care to observe that which is staring him or her in the face upon first entering into contact with an entire advertisement”.

As an example, in the UK (and elsewhere in the EU), the issue of “net neutrality” has been dealt with largely by requiring traffic management policies to be transparent. But a recent report Lost on the Broadband Super Highway from Consumer Focus highlights that consumers have very limited understanding of the term “traffic management” or of any information that is provided in relation to it. Likewise, an Ofcom consultation on price rises in fixed term contracts discusses the importance of transparency at the point of sale of conditions relating to contract termination within the fixed term. It underlines that even if initial transparency is achieved, price rises during the contract may still be unexpected and potentially unfair; and goes on to discuss how information on price rises that do occur must be presented very clearly and plainly, along with information on opting to end the contract, to reach consumers in an effective way.

The road ahead: more remedies and less confusopoly

A recent Ofcom research publication on consumer information remedies recognises a slew of desirable characteristics for information provision, including that consumers are actually aware of the information; and that the information is accessible, trustworthy, accurate, comparable, clear and understandable, and timely. The report includes many examples of aiming to achieve such characteristics in other sectors, and discusses the pros and cons of different parties, including regulators, providing the information. While pointing to the unmanageable load of processing too much or too complex information, the report does not mention the simple approach that Jim Alleman put forward in his recent contribution to this blog – namely that companies should automatically put consumers on the tariff which would be cheapest for them, given their actual usage pattern. As Jim points out, this would be one way to redress the inevitable information imbalance between providers and consumers. Researchers at the University of East Anglia have recently made a similar, if less radical, suggestion in relation to energy tariffs in a paper Complexity and Smart Nudges with Inattentive Consumers. Ofcom’s report is published for discussion, and culminates not in any proposals for action, but in a large number of questions for those designing information remedies to ask themselves. Maybe we can see it as a tentative first step – or just a feeler – along the road towards bolder regulatory interventions such as Jim has proposed, to help real people get good deals out of this “confusopoly” in which we find ourselves.

This post was originally published on the LSE Network Economy Forum blog.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the British Politics and Policy blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please read our comments policy before posting.

About the Author

Claire Milne is a Visiting Senior Fellow in LSE’s Department of Media and Communications. She has had a long and varied career with telecommunications policy as its central theme. Since 1989 she has been a freelance consultant, providing policy and regulatory advice in dozens of countries on all continents. In parallel she has served on several public bodies in the UK. Her early career was with BT; she has degrees in Mathematics and Statistics.

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This work by British Politics and Policy at LSE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported.