{"id":284368,"date":"2010-02-05T21:36:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-06T02:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20100202\/0225108000.shtml"},"modified":"2010-02-05T21:36:00","modified_gmt":"2010-02-06T02:36:00","slug":"because-when-metropcs-says-no-contract-it-actually-means-well-of-course-theres-a-contract","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/284368","title":{"rendered":"Because When MetroPCS Says ‘No Contract,’ It Actually Means ‘Well, Of Course There’s A Contract’"},"content":{"rendered":"

The mobile phone business seems to have a serious problem with taking words that have a pretty clear meaning in English, using them in advertising and marketing promotions — but meaning something entirely different. For example, various mobile operators claimed “unlimited”<\/a> broadband, but to them “unlimited” meant “really, quite limited.”<\/a> Well, it seems we’ve got another situation like that, such as MetroPCS’s widespread marketing campaign that loudly proclaimed “No Contract<\/i>.” Well, guess what, it actually meant that there absolutely is a contract<\/a>, and any customer who signed up for MetroPCS after seeing the “No Contract.” advertisement would obviously know that, because in the welcome kit it sent, it pointed users to a URL, and at the bottom of that URL there was another link to a terms of service, and in the terms of service there was another link to “start a service request” which included some boilerplate about how you were agreeing to a contract. And, apparently, this is all very legal.<\/p>\n

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The mobile phone business seems to have a serious problem with taking words that have a pretty clear meaning in English, using them in advertising and marketing promotions — but meaning something entirely different. For example, various mobile operators claimed “unlimited” broadband, but to them “unlimited” meant “really, quite limited.” Well, it seems we’ve got […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-284368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284368\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}