Generally speaking, contracts between two parties who know what they're doing, with lawyers, are pretty iron-clad.
But TOS with consumers are not. Unreasonable/abusive TOS clauses are struck down quite frequently. Things like consumer protection laws supersede anything in a TOS.
And consumer protection laws are precisely the kind of thing meant to stop companies from playing bait-and-switch with consumers like this.
Feels like customers want to have their cake and eat it: lock the carrier in, but have no obligations of their own.
No.
Would you feel the same if the landlord of your month-to-month rental upgraded you to a more expensive house?
Sure they can increase the rent, and you can move somewhere else, but there is baseline a expectation that the house you rented will not change.
I mean, if they renovated my unit or even the common areas, and told me I could stay at a higher rent I'd think that was just fine. It happened to me at least once already, come to think of it.
But yeah, they raised the rent on people without term commitments effective immediately, and anyone on a term contract could keep their old rate until it expired.
Again if you don't like the risk of this changing out from under you, sign a term contract, right?
Note that consumer panels will have less ability to force a vendor to set prices or provide specific services, so there will not be the third option of c) force the vendor to continue providing the service at the contracted price.
> in Europe abusive and surprising (to an informed party) terms and condiations
It can't be surprising to any informed party that prices change. Especially right now, it cannot be argued in good faith that a price increase was surprising to anyone.
Does the user have to opt in each time the service changes (for ex if 2G service gets dropped)? Who decides what changes require a user's approval?