I believe this issue needs to be tackled at a legislative level, along
the lines of trade practice. There is too much at stake for powerful
companies to practise any form of self-regulation here.
What gets overlooked here in Oz is that in the US, together with
free-enterprise capitalism they also have some fairly sophisticated
legislation to keep corporations from running the show. We've espoused
the first without the protection of the latter.
So - forget about complaining to banks, you'll be ignored unless you and
all your mates are multi-millionaires. I cited the positive example of
Macquarie uni to show that this is not a technical issue.
I'm looking at tackling this thru political lobbying (Kim Beazeley and
KIate Lundy were making positive noises until they were mysteriously
silenced before the last election), and finding any existing legislation
which may be invoked. Surely a company can't force its customers to use
a particular product before it does business with them ?
cheers
Rod
On Sun, 2005-01-02 at 12:50 +1100, Mary Gardiner wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 02, 2005, Elliott-Brennan wrote:
> > I don't know that I'd EVER change banks because I had to do some extra
> > work to access their site - though if I could not access it at all,
> > that'd be a problem!
>
> Even in my case, where I would have to notify several different direct
> debitors and creditors of a new bank account it's enough of a pain: it
> would take two years' use or so of a good online banking site to make up
> the time lost switching accounts.
>
> It's not all or nothing. ("If you don't like it, leave!") Continuing to
> use a bank's services does not somehow mean that you've invalidated your
> right to complain to or about them, as discussion here occasionally
> suggests. Being unable to take your business elsewhere does lose you
> some power in the commericial relationship, but not all of it.
>
> It may be worth looking at or getting involved with the Mozilla Tech
> Evangelism project: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tech-evangelism/
>
> -Mary
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