Consumers are so used to misleading advertisements that, if an offer seems too good to be true, it has become second nature to search for the small print.

Statements like prices starting from X amount or up to Y download speeds mean we should expect the bare minimum. But at least in these cases, there's enough information to imply that a range of values exists. Recently, however, companies are being allowed to redefine individual words.

Magazines often offer free gifts, some every single issue. Although we know that the cost of the gift has been factored in to the cost of the magazine, it's acceptable because you're partly paying for the magazine.

Amazon Prime recently came to the UK. If you frequently pay to have orders delivered, it isn't a bad deal: For just £49 a year, you'll enjoy an exclusive membership program that gives you and your family the benefits of unlimited Free One-Day Delivery on millions of eligible items sold by Amazon.co.uk. But if the delivery is free, what service are you actually paying for? They probably get around this issue by also offering a discount on Express and Evening Delivery. Technically, they can claim that you're paying for the discount, the "free" one-day delivery is just a bonus.

To a broadband Internet Service Provider (ISP), the noun unlimited doesn't mean "without limits". Instead, downloading is subject to a fair use policy, which is effectively a cap on how much internet you can use.

When Apple released the iPhone, O2 offered an Unlimited data plan. But after saying that fair usage meant under 1,400 web page downloads per day, they had to backtrack. Other mobile phone operators and ISPs get around this by not advertising how much web traffic they consider "fair" or "excessive".

Companies get away with such doubletalk and all the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) actually does is ensure that small print exists: Something can be described as ‘unlimited' even if a fair-use policy exists. However, the existence of the fair-use policy should be stated in the ad, and the policy should only be invoked to prevent misuse of the service.

Don't hope for intervention from the Government: a petition signed by over 9,000 people elicited a similar response. Both the ASA and the government miss the point. Although companies should have the right to impose limits on services to protect other customers, they shouldn't be allowed to intentionally deceive people on what they're selling.

It's unreasonable to expect consumers to look for quotes and asterisks before they can safely assume that a word means what it's supposed to. Adding a qualifier to a noun so that it means the opposite of its definition undermines language: use a different word.