ITWire

The ACCC is Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission, and instead of targeting petrol and supermarket rip offs, likes to puff its chest over questionable “victories” over Apple and the iPad 4G, and now TV makers.

The news was covered by iTWire colleague Stuart Corner, but as readers who’ve read my thoughts on the ACCC know, there’s more to the story than the supposed “consumer victory” that the ACCC would have us all believe they’ve grandly achieved.

Despite my memory of TVs bearing the term “cable ready” from the US market and sold in Australia ten or twenty years ago, it seems some consumers are easily confused: they think “Wi-Fi Ready” means Wi-Fi is installed in the TV itself, when it has always meant the TV is Wi-Fi capable, and needs a Wi-Fi dongle.

Why have manufacturers done this? Well, I haven’t asked them, but it’s obvious: to showcase the capabilities of their TVs in being upgradable to Wi-Fi connectivity status – and to sell a Wi-Fi dongle at an additional price, while being able to lower the cost of a TV that might otherwise never have its Wi-Fi connection used – especially considering the higher quality you’ll get from a fixed, wired connection for video compared with Wi-Fi.

Now, it’s true that retailers should have had their sales staff explain this very simple thing to consumers, but as we all know, not all retail sales staff are in the right jobs or even know what they’re talking about at times – especially in the tech space.

However, consumers should not be stupid – they have the Internet, they should be able to ask questions of the sales person, they should be able to read the text on the box before they hand over the money, they should be smart – instead of running off to the ACCC with their Ethernet cables between their legs when they realise they misunderstood what Wi-Fi Ready meant.

Of course, Wi-Fi Ready or “Wireless LAN Ready” are terms used on the global market, so the ACCC in forcing TV makers to create new packaging and materials just for the Australian market, which will PUSH UP PRICES – something the boneheads at the ACCC are obviously unaware of while they collect their shamefully large government paycheques – and push up Australian prices, even though, as is typical of government actions, they presumably wanted to make competition deliver lower prices.

The ACCC’s victorious statement is available to read at its site, and it means not only new packaging and promotional materials for TVs, but Blu-Ray players that are “Wi-Fi Ready”, too.

Faced with the ACCC’s government-delivered power, Sony, LG, Panasonic, Samsung and Sharp obviously had no choice but to “cooperate positively with the ACCC and change their marketing practices to make sure they fully inform consumers about the WiFi accessibility of their products”, according to the ACCC’s document.

It also means that, unlike the rest of the world, Australian WiFi Ready gadgets will now explicitly state “USB Wireless LAN adaptor required”, or “WiFi cable with Optional Adaptor” or “Wireless LAN Adaptor required, sold separately”.

So, despite years of TVs claiming “cable ready” which simply meant they had the red, white and yellow RCA connectors, at least the ACCC has made things clearer for consumers who obviously cannot rely on salespeople to properly inform them, and made things clearer for consumers who just blithely go into retail stores without doing any research first or even shopping around to ensure the retailer – and manufacturer – isn’t telling them marketing porkies.

Indeed, I’ll happily concede that the new marketing terms for Wi-Fi do make things clearer, but the ACCC’s obvious willingness to avoid the hard things and just go for low hanging fruit that is only a big deal because the ACCC makes it so… makes my blood boil at these public servants getting paid squillions for pretending to care about us!

ACCC chairman Rod Sims said “Consumers should be confident that any claim of 'WiFi Ready' or 'Wireless LAN Ready' means exactly that, unless clearly stated that an additional adaptor is required”, and added that “the ACCC considered that the term 'Ready', when used in promoting audiovisual products, is widely understood by consumers to mean the product is capable of accessing WiFi, without the need to purchase any further device”.

Where was the ACCC during the “cable ready” days of TV, eh? Not there. Had they been, the Wi-Fi Ready “scandal” of today simply wouldn’t have happened.

With the ACCC being the competitive law of the land, we now know that the term ‘Ready’ “had the potential to mislead consumers and contravene the Australian Consumer Law”.

So, if you’re a company wanting to promote your technology as being “ready” to work with another, like Wi-Fi, you'd better be "ready" lest the ACCC come after you, too.