The government is ready to intervene in the case of telephone bills and pay TV. Operators, fixed and mobile, have moved – as is well known – the billing times from the month to 4 four weeks. In a nutshell, this means paying 13 bills a year instead of 12.
The novelty has sparked the protest of consumer associations and something is moving in parliament, with the parliamentarians of the Democratic Party intending to propose a rule that makes the contracts homogeneous and fixed the limits to the unilateral changes of the operators.
Against the 28-day invoicing mechanism for telephone and pay TV bills, the Minister for Relations with Parliament, Anna Finocchiaro, announced that the Government is evaluating "regulatory interventions". The greater protection of consumers and the homogeneity of the contractual conditions in terms of transparency and the time base for the calculation of the costs to be invoiced must be "an objective to be pursued concretely", underlined the minister. The executive is therefore considering sending "specific reports" to the Antitrust.
The tug of war on bills has already been underway for some months but without concretely appreciable results for consumers, at least so far. In fact, in March Agcom had intervened with its resolution establishing that the unit of time for the frequency of invoices in fixed telephony should be the month. In fact, the bill every 28 days, according to the Control Authority on telecommunications, TV and publishing, does not allow the customer to have the correct perception of the price offered by each operator and, therefore, to evaluate the cost.
All the major operators (Tim, Vodafone, Wind-Tre, Fastweb) and also Sky for pay TV have aligned themselves with billing every 28 days. Agcom's ban seems to have been ignored by the companies for now. So much so that, on Thursday, the Authority launched a new sanctioning procedure against Tim, Wind Tre, Vodafone and Fastweb "for non-compliance with the provisions relating to the timing of billing and renewals of electronic communications offers".
