or they are not are not usually exclusive they have a product change and then it leads to a price change yeah i mean i think that the twenty fifteen opinion didn't speak of product changes it spoke of requirements for race within a product but  think that a product change a change to the to the list of market dominant products are the you know composition of our services i didn't see anything in that opinion that suggested the price caption apply to that because i mean it in the in the earlier case the barca case we weren't changing the nature of the service we're offering we're just search changing what you need to do to get the underlying services the same here we're saying we're not we're not charging you more for it we're not making it do something to get different to get it we're saying we don't want to offer it anymore and that to me does not sound like a rate change that sounds like a request to the commission which you know again we didn't do this unilaterally we requested the commission who we want to change the product list we want to get rid of this service we don't offer it anymore and the commission analyzed that said you have good reasons to get rid of it and then said but you course are going to have to pay for it in the form of price increase and that leads to the sort of second bucket of arguments here the most obvious one is that you know regulator generally has to treat like cases alike and the commission has never before that we know of i don't know i'm sure has not treated other changes to the product lists as also  essentially instead of i mean you know what the the idea is that the recipient of the product has to pay right you know we collect the payment right to the hundred we were the only the change we were made to change we're proposing making to that was rather than have the  yeah and so we wanted to just change it in our view that was right or in our view that was a reasonable change to a product definition wasn't a rate change because we were charging a different price and that the commission i think agreed with that that it wasn't a great issue it was just are you off you know the nature of what you're offering his shoe and you went ahead i thought that was reviewed under we have although we didn't go ahead with that because i think the commission deferred sort of the question of whether you know sort of the regulatory issue of know there are certainly similarities so use an assumption that they're making with which you could create exceptions because there is one common feature this is like the last case you're forcing people into a higher rate category that's the assumption yours of assumption is not shown anywhere first of all are not the same services and there's nothing to show because there are alternatives up and down right that's really the organ here which makes it very different from the other the seems to be their notion as i guess picking an alternative through it's proper to go to the question of finding alternatives to ask if there is some service still offered postcards and pay for all these bells and whistles right yeah i mean i think that there they get that i don't know you know i think i mean you know two different things there but i think the good news is that under thirty six forty two that's exactly the type of inquiry that the commission engages in right i mean the statute requires in determining whether we can eliminate a service at a service to consider the the where they go to the views of users of the mail so the commission can target its inquiry into exactly that kind of question that if if if if purchasers of return receipt for merchandise came back that we proposed this right this isn't we can't do this unilaterally we proceed to the commission and if users of the mail say came there users of this service say oh you know this isn't really fair to us because the only reason we like th service is because of this one feature and to get that one feature we now have to buy up to something else that is an argument in favor of denying the request right i mean but but having granted the request having said no no no there are good reasons to get rid of this can say oh yeah i mean but just back to the matter being consistent that the if the commission isn't hasn't treated the addition of a new service as a rate change or the transfer of a service which is essentially just eliminating it from the market dominant list and adding a parallel new service to the competitive us it's it's unexplained why it would treat the removal of a service from the menu as a great rate change and is especially odd that they were apply a test that they develop specifically for mail preparation changes which deal with which we can generally do unilaterally otherwise why they analyzed my they analyze sort of the request of the commission to remove a service  that but i think that the one other question of the one other point about the alternatives as we say they're either zero because they're different services or they're to the commission should at least consider the fact that the reason that this particular service we want to get instant step two should have been as as that the christians have the earlier case that once you get to that step you generally hold meyler behavior constant had they done that they would not have said they instead guessed what mailers will do if they couldn't get this service anymore but i think our fundamental point is that this is not a not a change in race in the first place it's just a change to our menu of offerings that separately analyzed under section very easy for you do if the court does have any further glad you asked that question on it because no that's not correct that's not the commission's position what it's doing when it figures out the rate change is looking at the price of sending the same mail last year and this year so that mail is reallocated in the first year and then in the next year there is no more reallocation to be done we've we've sort of got rid of that price so if you think about say there are ten pieces of mail obviously not the real number going by their return receipt mail last last year and those pieces of mail are going to be treated as certified mails return receipt and then said something like you know that extra dollar fifty or fifty dollars next year when we look at the price of sending last year's mail this year there won't be any mail coming in as return receipt mail because that has been a limit it so all of the mail is you  in price that's right so the difference between right the say in may of last year and this year it's sort of just wash out there will know i mean either way whether they're right or whether they're wrong it's just been counted once in that one year and it may have been counted radically wrong but it's just one year and that's over that's right your honor and it does it affect it doesn't affect does it affect the baseline for the following year so  that was made for example if here we think all the people who got return receipt for merchandise the assumption is they're all going to go for certified mail and if that right with at the mail that came in and in that next year where there is no return receipt mail because that's been eliminated and we would look at how much it cost to send that mail last year and how much i sent that mail the next year so the return recei mail would be completely gone because no return receipt mail with would come in and the next year and as my answer if the post office right in saying that everyone goes to the less cheaper product all former returned receipt people everything's fine for the second year but in the year in question that the post office is barred from  rate cap space to get rid of return receipt mail then it can't raise other rates in that category right that the whole category as a whole has to fit within the rate of inflation but of course if there is a service like this one where there are declining volumes the amount of rate cap that that that it would take to make the change goes goes down and down so only a few people are using return receipt mail it doesn't take very much rate happened to get rid of it but for those people who continue to use it if they go to the post office and they say i want that postcard we're going to assume that they're going forward but when you say it could be over time effect it's a little bit confusing the way i think the way we're talking you're positing there are different times at which  one time event might occur if it occurs when the change has already been largely taken place then the elimination of the service is going to be cheaper in rate cap terms than if this one time one expands one year use a price cap authority is done earlier it's a bigger dislocation to the public says the commission and it's also going to cost them more of the price cut but either way it doesn't matter whether after it's done it doesn't matter whether the commission was right or wrong in assuming that the people who used to get r m are going to go to certified mail with return receipt or not it doesn't matter because it's done it was treated that way and there's no legacy effect of whether that was right or wrong on the price cap right so maybe some of those people will go to certified mail with return receipt and then the next year the volume for  historical volume in each sub part of the service category to calculate the price cap so we can apply it to the new change so the only time the actual fact of what mailers do in response to the elimination of a so it's not an assumption and it's the same thing that we were doing last time where we take the historical value and we say if somebody asked for the post card with the signature on it last year  so i think the best statement of it might be going back to the two thousand and seven rule making where we decided that this was the way we're going to calculate changes in rates and the postal service is submission then page a quick note five for other purposes it may be useful to estimate what the volume proportions might be after rate distinctions are introduced in mailers respond to the new price incentives but that exercise should not be confused with the augmentation of historical it's very technical for purposes of calculating compliance with the rate cap rate so what the postal service said initially and what we do because we cannot make predictions we some people will pay more some people pay less we don't know what the numbers will be and we can't figure that out in the forty five days commission having that out of the forty five days that congress gave them so what the commission does is it just says if last year you went to the counter and said i want that i want to send this i get the postcard with a regional signature you would pay for receive mail next year i want it said so i get the postcard with the original signature you pay for certified mail with return receipt now people are going to make different choices in return to the car in response the cost incentives but we don't know what that those choices are going to be and so this is entirely consistent with our our regulatory scheme we can't predict that's set out but the post i believe it starts with the postal service coming in and making its proposal for the next year and then the commission gets responses and there's to briefing it can ask the postal service question and there's a back and forth but that whole process goes into effect january one i don't own year but i believe that everything goes into effect on iran the following year but i'm not one hundred percent sure about the exact time what i do know is that congress in this statute gave the commission forty five with the posters recommendation we can't go through this whole process in the forty five days and we just need a straightforward answer to that and our straightforward an thirty six twenty two applies that's the system for regulating rates and classes for market dominant products so anything that's on the market dominant list that system that before figuring out the rate is going to apply to it so this is really different from the situation in which we move something off of the market on an atlas reckon fishermen's something off the market down list on to the competitive less right if something is a can move on to the competitive product list the market regulates the price and keeps that price from being too high but anything that is on the market dominant list on that list of products for which the postal service has a monopoly those products  they're completely different services they have one little thing feature i can't tell your server to fact that is not support it's supported by the postal service me but there is an alternative rates all right there is you can still go to the counter and say i want to send this so i get that postcard with a regular signature packing the answer to the question what if you come and say i just want  always go to medium rare you say i want an order of french fries and all the teenage kids from the neighborhood go there in the restaurant is now we want to upgrade we don't want us to keep coming in from france after school so we're going to say we don't serve side of french fries we only have the steak  it right and you're trying to say that they are still offering the french fries because they're on the side of the steak i'm saying that for the people who only want the french fries if they really want the french fries they have to pay more right so for the people know for two dollars less you can get on a confirmation and they can do that and i believe they have already done that right good first year well so they did they would have to do that in your zero so they do that and they've already been doing that which is why the the people who are left here are the people who are saying now i want that physical post cart now maybe if they have the choice of still paying even more for the culture they won't buy it but that gets into the kind of predictions that we can't make in forty five days the people who are here are the people who have said i want the physical postcard or who have not been given the information about the different rates but the post service has the ability to make this change to encourage people to make a change by giving them the information that yeah i don't know who these people are there were no people in this part of the problem here there were no people that came forward and said the only reason i use this service is to get this postcard in so also sort of odd that the theory is that the postal service is the driving down the volume of the service by encouraging people to buy a less expensive service which we don't get any credit for by the way as in terms of price it's like it's a reduction we've been doing that as part of some long con that at the end when there are only a couple people left we're going to hit them with the right price increase why have we been encouraging everybody to buy down it doesn't it really truly doesn't make any sense the the fact is there are two alternatives or no alternatives look either way there's no finding that the only reason the people here use this service is to get the feature that's only available for the more expensive don't know why they're there here choosing i think the point is just that they're choosing that rule so that no speculation is involved it's a formal rule it's just a few out it's just like this is the default rule we're doing at it's the opposite though in some ways of the rule they rely on the other  come whereas if you're really rigid about wanting that same thing it's on and only the postcard and there's just no i get no finding on that and there was there was a commission counsel correct in saying that the phantom revenue were answering slightly different questions or i don't know i'm not understanding the question it the way i'm thinking of it is you know we assume from whatever we're doing that say there were ten pieces that we're going to zoom that that are in question and we're going to soon they're all going to spend more rather pay one time so this is the story i think that what they're saying is right or wrong is an empirical matter we're going to charge you as if it were the case that everyone's come to the surf right now and it's going to cost you more if you do this when not that many people have shifted going to cost you less that people aren't even wanting to do the r m but we're going to charge him once and we're and the price cap is is only looking at the increment change in price i think and therefore the following year there's no increment change until some other product is being some other price is being changed and then you don't look back you know three years you look at only the preceding year so that it's just washed away whatever happened right or wrong accurate or not when the r m was dropped now you've got a new array of actual behavior and that involves maybe if you're  where there is no legacy effect i mean an example would be let's choose let's use our am as an example that the assumption is we're going to puke to you the revenue you would have gotten had everyone bought up right so so that that's counts against us it's revenue that but if in reality we didn't get it in fact people buy them so we lose revenue in reality we get imputed revenue and then effectively lose revenue and also in reality and let's say in year two we choose to raise the price of sig confirmation we have to get hit harder there because this revenue that the shadow revenue that went up now they're looking at real volume that went down and we get charged again you know i'm saying that and so in that sense certainly in that sense there's a legacy the way the price cap accounts for supposedly price rises but not as you say discounts right and i think that's a certainly that's that's fair to say and i think that's every we're not claiming for example price cap credit for efforts to encourage mailers for signature confirmation and we're trying to encourage them to use a more you know a product that had would have more value to them to make us a more attractive provider of services rights we have benefits but it's not a price tag we're not claiming oh that's a price reduction and actually in some ways this is very similar to intelligent man of the commission should be very careful in treating things as great as price cap issues because we really can't get that you know that so that's that's why in three hundred twenty three thousand dollars a year so obviously pales in comparison to the three hundred sixty eight million dollars that they are puting to us under the the bar code rule and the potential literally tens if not you know tens of billions of correct because now when we first came to the commission at that time sixty four percent had already complied voluntarily and they said they said ok well essentially but if the other thirty six percent don't it would be one point two billion dollars of revenue a year they would pay us but of course they won't we will never get that which was proven two years later when we came back to them and said ok well now two thirds of that money you said we were going to get every year is clearly not happening because that these people have voluntarily complied at that point you would think the commission would say oh maybe this isn't that big a deal you know maybe the mailers are equipped to handle this this is actually not that big a change but instead they said well the last twelve percent no they won't comply and the effect of that would be three hundred sixty eight million dollars and when i say the legacy effect that really is three hundred sixty eight million dollars they assume we will get every year going forward in the form of people not complying when in fact they actually did i mean assuming we've done four of  we couldn't because we didn't have we can't afford to taking a three hundred sixty eight million dollars let alone a one point two billion dollars annual price cap hit if it was just about us trying to get revenue but we'll just do that through price and we're certainly not going to take a cap hit have to go to blueberry muffin with guess there's no such thing as a rematch and with fake a chair in the first case because then the case is no longer alive i mean the commission to do whatever it wants right wise right and i think they will and should but let's say we say