Broadband internet providers won’t be able to submerge the least palatable parts of their product in fine print under a proposed rule advanced Thursday by the FCC. All four commissioners voted to approve writing regulations to require ISPs to surface the parameters of their services in a format modeled after nutrition-facts labels on packaged foods.
“It helps consumers make good choices,” FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel said today of the FDA’s label requirement. “The FCC needs to do the same with broadband.”
The commission proposed a voluntary scheme for broadband labels in 2016, then dropped that initiative under the Trump administration as part of a regulatory retreat that also saw the FCC scrap pending broadband-privacy regulations and smash the “undo” button on net-neutrality rules it had adopted in 2015.
That allowed internet providers to keep customers guessing about such critical details as upload speeds, service rates after the first or second year, and the cost to rent a modem or gateway. Some reveal those data points toward the end of the sign-up process, while others bury them in disclosure pages that they leave as an exercise for customers to locate on their sites.
For example, the “details” page Comcast shows for a 600Mbps Xfinity cable broadband plan at a Bay Area address does not specify that plan’s 15Mbps upload speed or 1.2TB data cap.
This habitual obscurity can leave even policies as basic as data caps unclear; a 2021 survey found that nearly half of respondents didn’t know the limit on their plan.
Broadband labels saw a rebirth under the Biden administration, which included them in the broadband provisions of its infrastructure bill. Section 60504 of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act requires the FCC to write rules mandating them within a year of that law’s November 2021 enactment.
Thursday’s vote moves that rule-making process forward. The “notice of proposed rulemaking” posted before today’s FCC meeting includes a sample label for wired providers that lists:
- the month-to-month rate, including the non-promotional rate;
- the contract rate;
- the data cap, if any, and overage charges associated with it;
- the cost to rent a modem and if customers can bring their own;
- other monthly or one-time fees and any government taxes and fees;
- typical download speeds;
- typical upload speeds;
- typical latency;
- typical packet loss;
- brief descriptions of its network-management practices, both application-specific and those triggered by subscriber actions;
- a link to the provider’s privacy policy;
- the address of the provider’s customer-support page and its customer-support phone number.
The FCC’s proposal also covers wireless broadband services; a longer sample label in the notice provides more room to document speed-based rate plans and link to their bring-your-own-device policies. It does not, however, have a field in which wireless carriers would be required to describe clearly what flavors of 5G they provide.
