Once upon a time, Brandon Wade via NANOG <nanog@nanog.org> said:
We've been a GTT customer for several years and on our latest bill we now have a "Regulatory Recovery Surcharge" of almost 10% tacked on. We only purchase IP Transit services from them, nothing else, and have never had any fees tacked on top of our contracted agreed upon amount. Has anyone else ran into this? If this is a legit "surcharge" any idea of why we were never charged for that before? I figured I'd reach out to the community on this prior to jumping to further conclusions.
It's a "because they can" fee - consumer cable and phone companies have been doing this for years to advertise lower prices and raise rates on customers in a fixed-price contract. So far, there hasn't been sufficient push-back to make it stop (and almost all of these contracts have binding arbitration clauses, so nobody can get it to a court for a precedent-setting decision). -- Chris Adams <cma@cmadams.net>