A "mistake" at the phone company caused them to bill us in the 1990s for the calls we made to dial-up. The whole purpose of using that company was that they had zero charges for local calls of any length, and the dial-up service existed /because/ of that facility, dozens of households were like ours and just stayed connected over dial-up for days at a time. Essentially it's the same service you'd now think of as normal (via DSL) except much less bandwidth and you can't receive phone calls (we all had mobiles). This gave me the important insight that what most mattered for newer technologies like ADSL is that they are Always On Internet, not the bandwidth increase, because we had no extra bandwidth compared to neighbours but we used the Internet very differently because it was perpetually there. There was some 10base2 running around the house to a Linux PC with a modem and a NAT mapped all the PCs onto the dial-up address.
Anyway the person who sorted phone bills out got this bill for some obscene amount of money and they phoned up to say no, these calls are contractually supposed to be free, send us a revised bill that removes these charges.
The phone company says "Ah, you need to specifically identify any call you're disputing and then we can consider altering the charges". Which is now making _us_ do their job. Nope.
So he just gets the bill and crosses everything out. Absolutely everything on the bill gets crossed out, test calls, dial-up, everything, and sure enough the phone company took the hint and just zeroed the bill and stopped messing us about.
Try that in vast majority of the homes and businesses in the US, and you'll be stuck without a high speed internet connection. There's only one company running wires, and if you piss them off, they might decide not to deal with you.
Municipal contracts to be the only provider while avoiding being classified as a utility. Nice combination that was allowed over and over throughout the last two decades.
Well that's too bad, because customers like us were what was available. I doubt that they lost money on us, at least when they weren't paying somebody to waste our time on the phone and then correct their bogus invoices - simply they made less money than they might have liked.
The people who make my boots seemed disappointed that I didn't want to pay them 250% of the normal price when for a few years the boots were fashionable and people who don't actually care what boots are for were wearing them because it was "Hot", but they got over it, and I'm still buying their boots, at the same price I did before, and they're still making a profit, just not Scrooge McDuck money.
Anyway the person who sorted phone bills out got this bill for some obscene amount of money and they phoned up to say no, these calls are contractually supposed to be free, send us a revised bill that removes these charges.
The phone company says "Ah, you need to specifically identify any call you're disputing and then we can consider altering the charges". Which is now making _us_ do their job. Nope.
So he just gets the bill and crosses everything out. Absolutely everything on the bill gets crossed out, test calls, dial-up, everything, and sure enough the phone company took the hint and just zeroed the bill and stopped messing us about.