For the past year and a half, internet providers have been required to display broadband “nutrition labels” that show key information for each plan. On Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission voted to water down its requirements.
Tuesday’s vote was technically a “Notice of Proposed Rulemaking,” which will allow public comment before a final vote. If it’s passed — a highly likely outcome given the commission’s Republican majority — internet service providers will no longer be required to read the labels to customers over the phone. Nor will they be obligated to give a complete accounting of the fees on broadband plans and make the labels available in a subscriber’s account portal.
I’ve been writing about broadband for seven years, and I can tell you firsthand how difficult it is to find basic plan information from many ISPs. Between price increases, hidden fees and advertised speeds, it felt like you needed a law degree to find out what you’d actually be paying each month.
When broadband labels were implemented in April 2024, all of that changed overnight. You could suddenly see the real price that would show up on your bill today and in the years to come. Now, the FCC looks poised to return internet customers to the dark.
“It’s the start of whittling away at these rules,” Raza Panjwani, senior policy counsel at New America’s Open Technology Institute, told CNET. “You get this two-step, right? You make it less useful. Then you say, ‘Oh, look, it’s not that useful. We should get rid of it.’”
A sample of the FCC’s broadband consumer labels for home internet and mobile broadband plans.
What happens next
After Tuesday’s vote, there will be 30 days for public comment, then another 30 days to reply to those comments. By the end of the year, the FCC will vote on whether to adopt the rules permanently.
Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat on the commission, called the proposal “one of the most anti-consumer items I have seen.”
“What adds insult to injury is that the FCC does not even explain why this proposal is necessary,” Gomez said. “Make it make sense. Instead of scaling back the information that customers receive, we should be making sure that, in fact, they can benefit from the labels.”
Broadband labels have generally been well-received by customers. One 2024 survey study of more than 2,500 broadband consumers found that 85% of respondents found them useful for comparison shopping.
Carr says existing labels add confusion
“Since the labels became available, some have said that finding the needed information can be a ‘Sisyphean task,’ or even feel like a game of Where’s Waldo,” said FCC Chair Brendan Carr. “They aren’t finding the information they need to make an informed decision or not finding it in an efficient and timely manner.”
It’s hard to argue with Carr that the broadband labels are difficult to locate. When I tried to find the labels through Xfinity and Spectrum, I first had to put in an eligible address, and even then, they were buried at the bottom of the page.
Spectrum’s broadband labels appear at the bottom of the checkout page.
“These labels are often sort of buried deep in the sales flow,” says Panjwani.
But rather than adopt rules that would make the labels easier to find or interpret, Carr voted to make them appear less often.
Too many fees to count
One of the more innocuous-sounding requirements on the chopping block is one that requires ISPs to “itemize state and local passthrough fees that vary depending on location of the consumer.”
“We believe … that itemizing can lead to a proliferation of labels and of labels so lengthy that the fees overwhelm other important elements of the label,” the FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking reads.
In other words, ISPs include so many fees on their plans that they shouldn’t be required to list them all.
“You’re telling us that you’ve made up so many fees to put under the fold that you can’t fit them on a label, and that’s unfair?” said Panjwani. “You know, you could just include that in your cost of service. Nothing is stopping you from doing that.”
The bottom line
These changes to the broadband labels sound relatively harmless on their own. I can’t argue against removing the requirement that ISPs let customers know about the Affordable Connectivity Program, which stopped accepting new enrollments nearly two years ago. But taken together, they have consumer advocates sounding the alarm.
“There have been some actions by the commission that are kind of anti-consumer,” Alisa Valentin, broadband policy director at the nonprofit Public Knowledge, told CNET. “I worry that if we chip away a little bit here, what’s going to stop them from trying to come up with another proposal to chip away some more to the point that the labels are essentially useless?”
For the next 30 days, anyone is free to comment on the proposed rules to the broadband labels. If you’d like to share your thoughts on broadband labels, you can submit a comment through the FCC’s portal by typing in 22-2 in the Proceeding field.
