High speed cash grab

>> Bell Sympatico’s new imposed contracts make clients cough up for past billing mistakes

by NOEMI LOPINTO

VENOR

In September 2000, documentary filmmaker Daniel Bitton, 26, subscribed to Bell Sympatico High Speed Edition. In December 2000, he found himself in the unusual position of trying to convince Bell to charge him for his subscription. By January, the billings department had yet to charge Bitton for services rendered . “They had a special,” says Bitton, “where you get the first three months free. That turned into 10 months of free service. I called them in the beginning and said: ‘I haven’t been charged in a few months, can I just pay now?’” Bitton subsequently read the terms of his service agreement, and was delighted to read, under “fees and charges,” the following: “In the event your Service Provider fails to bill you or underbills you for a charge, you will not be responsible for paying the previously unbilled or underbilled charge.”
“After that I was totally relaxed,” says Bitton, “and praying they wouldn’t remember me.”
Unfortunately for Bitton, Bell Sympatico remembered him in August, and began charging him the regular monthly fee. And he received a copy of his user agreement, with an important change. The new contract read, “...you will not be responsible for paying the previously unbilled charge...except where: i) in the case of a recurring charge, you are correctly billed within a period of one year from the date the charge was incurred... Any amount under this Service Agreement must be paid within 30 days...”
“I thought, ‘Oh my God, they’re going to fucking charge me!” says Bitton. “Does this mean they can invalidate any contract I ever had with them and charge me for their mistake retroactively?”
Jean Sébastien, a telecommunications analyst for Action Réseau Consommateurs, says telecommunications as a whole are not regulated, and there is no protection under the Consumer Protection Act. “The CRTC regulates telephone services only because they are a monopoly,” says Sébastien. “The Internet is not. The danger in this case is the unilateral modification of the contract by Bell, leaving no escape hatch for customers except cancelling the service. Such a practice leaves subscribers automatically bound, in the eyes of the company. It would be difficult for them to charge people retroactively now, but in the future, their contract permits it.”
In total, Bell Canada has more than 484,000 residential clients with Sympatico High Speed Edition. France Poulin, media contact for Bell, says 10,000 subscribers profited from the department’s temporary amnesia. “The clients who had not been billed for months, or in some cases a year, were advised in September. We will only bill them retroactively for three months of service.” However, a Bell employee told the Mirror that subscribers had yet to be notified. “We haven’t sent out that e-mail yet,” says the employee. “I am sure that is one e-mail no one will be happy to receive.”
Bitton, in the meantime, is on pins and needles awaiting his final bill: “I want to warn people out there that they might be coming after them,” he says. “Their contract is toilet paper if they can make retroactive changes and then charge you for it.” :