10:11:22 on Sat, 22 Mar 2014, Mark Goodge remarked:
That of course assumes the public knows what "Premium Rate" means. There's plenty of FUD about it at the best of times.
And I think PPP sets their own definition of what they police, which may not be the same as various technical definitions of PR.
The actual mechanism they are most interested in regulating is "revenue share", rather than "expensive to call". Which is where the Phone *pay* thing comes in, because consumers are using a phone to send that shared revenue to someone.
Premium Rate is where any part of the cost of the call is received by the recipient of the call, rather than the telcos. It's a synonym for Revenue Share, but uses a term which is more widely understood among the public. It's "Premium Rate" because the caller is paying a premium over and above the cost of the call itself.
PPP itself uses the term "premium rate" consistently across their website, and uses it in the sense that most people understand it. Which makes it all the more daft that their name givs the impression of something else.
Looking at their website, they define their remit pretty much as I have specified above. The only difference is that they also regulate SMS shortcodes even where there is no revenue share with the recipient of the message. I think that's reasonable, as the shortcode operators (which may or may not also be the telcos) are getting revenue from them even if their customer is not.
The reality, though, is that "expensive to call" and "revenue share" are pretty much the same thing.
13:37:24 on Sat, 22 Mar 2014, Mark Goodge remarked:
It's not as simple as that (or at the very least wasn't when the name change happened). In particular, 070 personal numbers has always been a difficult area to define, which is why they have the current rule of ">10p/minute", irrespective of whether or not the recipient has any revenue share.
Not at all. I probably still have an 07050 portable number (one of the very first to use a mobile platform to deliver that functionality) which cost about 50p/minute to callers, and it did not provide any revenue share.
The extra money went towards allowing me to have it delivered to a mobile number as well as to a landline; obviously, if redirected at a mobile most of the time it would have made them a lot less profit than if I had it redirected to a landline. The benefit was that I had one consistent number that people could call in an emergency, and it would get delivered to me wherever I had chosen to redirect it at that moment.
They also regulate 0871, 0872 and 0873, which are outside the 070/09 classic range of numbering regarded by the public as "Premium rate", and don't necessarily come with revenue share rather than value-add services paid for by the higher calling cost.
The old one may have meant nothing but at least you would have been confident you didn't know what it was; the new one seeds a number of false impressions making it more likely you will assume it's *not* what you were looking for. Appalling.
07012 345678 is a telephone number. The offering of an 07xx telephone number, managed and forwarded to your "real world" telephone connection is a product. The provision of that product to you is a service.
The current name sounds like a company which sells premium rate services to business which want to receive revenue share from inbound calls and messages. You can easily imagine this kind of blurb on their website:
Whether you want to earn money from providing premium rate telephone services, take micropayments or donations via SMS, or simply ensure that your inbound customer service calls offset their costs, then PhonePayPlus is for you.
We provide a full-featured service for handling inbound premium rate thelephone calls and SMS messages. Access your numbers and control your costs via our website. Or plug in to our API for total control.
We gaurnatee the highest revenue share rates in the industry. Fully ICSTIS compliant so you don't have to worry about falling foul of the law - just let us take care of that for you.
PhonePayPlus - Premium Rate calls, plus a whole lot more.
There is nothing in the name to create the negation or reveal the idea that it has something to do with complaining; all you have to go on is 'paying', 'more' and 'phone'.
Yes, and so should Ofcom. Any organisation, even if it's a quango, which administers statutory regulation should have a gov.uk domain. The use, or non-use, of a gov.uk domain should be one of the clearest indicators of whether a regulatory body has statutory force or is self-regulation.
At the moment, we have a situation where an organisation called "The Advertising Standards Authority" has a name which implies that it has statutory power, even though it doesn't, and an organisation called "PhonePayPlus" which has a name which implies that it doesn't have statutory power even though it does. And both have org.uk domains,
We may not be able to force regulators to choose sensible names (although it's noteworthy that an industry self-regulator does so), but we could at least force them to use appropriate domain names.
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