In the film, the protagonists decided to get back at their evil employer by running some software on the company servers that would round down all the transactions to the nearest cent and then dump all those fractions of a penny into a new account. The premise is that no one would notice those fractions but over millions of transactions it would add up to some serious cash. 

That's exactly what AT&T is doing to customers. By adding a $0.61 administrative fee to each customer every month. While it might not amount to much per customer, it amounts to half a billion dollars per year when you add it all up. 

By locking customers into two-year contracts, they guarantee that those customers can't leave.  The "downside" from AT&T's perspective is that they can't just raise their prices because the customers are under "contract." Instead they just create a new administrative fee that looks like a government charge. Nice if you can get away with it, which only big corporations like AT&T can do.

Yesterday's announcement from Better Place that they would liquidate leaves some serious questions for the relatively few customers they actually have. When BP started offering Renault Fluence electric car in Israel, they took a different approach from other manufacturers. 

Customers could buy or lease the car itself but the battery was not included for that price, making it essentially a brick. Just as you can't buy a smartphone from a US carrier today without signing up for 2-year data plan, Better Place customers had to pay separately for lease on the battery. That lease entitled customers to get charging at public stations and battery swaps at BP change stations. 

Presumably those customers will get to keep the battery they have now, and keep plugging it in, but we don't know. With a conventional purchase, if the company such as Fisker goes belly up, you still have the car and can drive it as long as it keeps running.  

Will anyone else try this approach in the future? Will customers try the approach?