I think this story is not very interesting. In particular: - Some new regulations were proposed. The regulator asks for comments. The industry says they don’t

I think this story is not very interesting. In particular: - Some new regulations were proposed. The regulator asks for comments. The industry says they don’t like the regulations. That is the general story here and so I think it is mostly not interesting. - The headline thing does sound hard. If you can’t see why it might be hard to figure out from your software and policies (built up through decades of mergers) exactly what all the fees are, I think you basically have a lack of imagination. Plenty of online stores even struggle to show you how much sales tax you’ll be charged. It is right for industry to state that this is hard but that it is hard needn’t mean that the regulations shouldn’t apply. Sometimes new rules are harder to implement than regulators expected and their deadlines get pushed back, but I think that’s basically still normal. I don’t think there is anything interesting here - Some other comments made were that consumers would find the list of fees confusing. That does sound confusing. (It would be even worse if they had to read out such a schedule over the phone) I personally think it wouldn’t be a particularly good outcome of the regulations for consumers to see some long list of potential extra fees below the sticker price – they don’t know the true price before and they don’t know the true price afterwards. I was not entirely convinced by the argument that this is like sales tax. I didn’t look at the alternative proposals, but plausibly some could be better. For example you could require a maximum price inclusive of fees and taxes be conspicuously advertised and require that fees may not total above this advertised maximum. It seems to me that the right rule would require companies to publish some number representing their cost where decreasing that number (a) gets them more business on the margin and (b) leads to less surprise bills to customers. The max-bill number could be decreased by knowing better what fees would be charged or by actually reducing the cost of services and I think both of those are things the regulator wants