Cellphone Empowerment Act

In our therapeutic culture, even cellphones need empowerment.
At least that’s what I thought when I saw the news that there’s something called the Cell Phone Empowerment Act floating around Congress. Turns out, I was too gadget-centric in my headline skimming. It’s actually the Cell Phone Consumer Empowerment Act. The products themselves will just have to wait for another legislative initiative to rescue them from enfeeblement.
Anyway, the upshot of the bill is this: prorated early termination fees, street-level accurate service maps, new disclosure rules for fees and taxes, and perhaps most importantly, a mandate that the FCC study phone “locking.”
CTIA has responded here. They note that recent FCC data show wireless contract complaints — indeed overall complaints about the wireless industry — have fallen and that the sponsors of the bill have relied on insufficiently up-to-date and contextualized data.