New FCC Broadband ‘Nutrition Label’ Will More Clearly Inform You You’re Being Ripped Off

from the transparently-terrible dept

For years we’ve noted how broadband providers impose all manner of bullshit fees on your bill to drive up the cost of service post sale. They’ve also historically had a hard time being transparent about what kind of broadband connection you’re buying. As was evident back when Comcast thought it would be a good idea to throttle all upstream BitTorrent traffic (without telling anybody), or AT&T decided to cap and throttle the usage of its “unlimited” wireless users (without telling anybody), or Verizon decided to modify user packets to track its customers around the internet (without telling anybody).

Maybe you see where I’m going with this.

Back in 2016 the FCC eyed the voluntary requirement that broadband providers be required to provide a sort of “nutrition label” for broadband. The idea was that this label would clearly disclose speeds, throttling, limitation, sneaky fees, and all the stuff big predatory ISPs like to bury in their fine print (if they disclose it at all). This was the example image the FCC circulated at the time:

While the idea was scuttled by the Trump administration, Congress demanded the FCC revisit it as part of the recent infrastructure bill. So the Rosenworcel FCC last week, as instructed by Congress, voted 4-0 to begin exploring new rules:

A final vote on approved rules will come after the Biden FCC finally has a voting majority, likely this summer. And unlike the first effort, this time the requirements will be mandatory, so ISPs will have to comply.

This is all well intentioned, and to be clear it’s a good thing Comcast and AT&T will now need to be more transparent in the ways they’re ripping you off. In fact, when AT&T recently announced it would be providing faster 2 and 5 Gbps fiber to some users, it stated it would be getting rid of hidden fees and caps entirely on those tiers. AT&T announced this as if they’d come up with the idea, when in reality they were just getting out ahead of the requirement they knew was looming anyway. So stuff like this does matter.

The problem of course is that forcing ISPs to be transparent about how they’re ripping you off doesn’t stop them from ripping you off. Big broadband providers are able to nickel-and-dime the hell out of users thanks to two things: regional monopolization causing limited competition, and the state and federal corruption that protects it. U.S. policymakers and lawmakers can’t (and often won’t) tackle that real problem, so instead we get these layers of band aids that only treat the symptom of a broken U.S. telecom market, not the underlying disease.

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Filed Under: broadband, fcc, nutrition labels