Punitive tariffs don’t work.
I read the SBC forum on BroadBandReports because, well, I’m an SBC DSL customer. Someone posted a topic last week about being told by an SBC Tier 1 callcenter employee that a long-distance charge would be imposed for the call to Tier 1. Since the call was made to an 877 number (ie free call), this had the poster in a bit of an uproar. It’s no secret that SBC has offshored its Tier 1 support to India, but that makes no difference — the call is free, period, SBC eats any long-distance that’s involved. (And I should make the point that SBC personnel stepped in immediately and said that the claim was bogus, there would not be any LD charge for that or any other Tier 1 call.)
In the ensuing discussion, some moron posted:
The government should step in and throw in a mandatory 5 dollar connect charge to any 8xx or 9xx number to india. That way outsourcing suddenly doesn’t cost less.
No, that way outsourcing suddenly costs the same, and you and I get whacked for the 5 dollar fee that SBC won’t eat, because it won’t eat (and should not have to eat) the cost of government regulation.
But the thing that annoys me most about this is the usual lefty Big Brother approach that says the government must protect us from Big Eeevil Corporations. Never mind that offshoring these jobs is actually opening up new opportunities here in the States.
I suppose some of these lefty Luddites think we ought to still be using horse and buggy for transportation, given that all those buggy-whip makers and livery stable workers lost their livelihoods when the automobile came in.