Telecom Activists Aren’t Impressed By The FCC’s ‘Nutrition Label’ For Broadband

Broadband

from the regulatory-theater dept

For the better part of the decade, the generally feckless FCC has been trying to require that broadband ISPs be a little more honest about broadband fees and limits at the point of sale. So they cooked up the idea of a “nutrition label for broadband,” detailing all of the little caveats and restrictions (real world speeds, caps, bizarre fees) ISPs now impose on your broadband line. Kind of like this:

But year after year the captured FCC could never quite get around to actually implementing the plan. Especially during the Trump era, where the agency was little more than a glorified rubber stamp for industry. But the infrastructure bill demanded it, so the FCC finally got around to acting.

Sort of.

Big ISPs like Comcast are already trying to weasel around the half-cooked restrictions. And at a recent industry event, broadband activists lamented that the labels the FCC are cooking up don’t go far enough in terms of detailing misleading pricing, promotional limits, or real world speeds. Or that the FCC’s program doesn’t even require that the label be placed on subscriber bills:

Joshua Stager, policy director at Free Press, said that the FCC declined to require that the label be put on the monthly bill. He warned that providers can hide the label from consumers which will result in a lack of market response simply because consumers are not aware that the label exists. 

So basically it’s a “nutrition” label that isn’t particularly transparent or useful, and consumers may never see. Very on brand for the nation’s top telecom regulator.

I’ve made the case repeatedly that the FCC often engages in regulatory theater. It’s comically terrified of doing something like directly tackling (or even acknowledging) the real cause of spotty, expensive, U.S. broadband: concentrated telecom monopoly power and the corruption that protects it.

It’s just too politically risky for agency bosses eyeing future political positions to risk pissing off big campaign contributors bone-grafted to our intelligence gathering efforts.

So instead the FCC often engages in theatrical half measures with a focus on “transparency.” In this case, policies that try (weakly) to demand more transparency from big ISPs as to how they rip you off, but that never actually thwart your local telecom monopolies’ effort to rip you off.

The FCC doesn’t gather and share broadband pricing data in any meaningful way (see our $400 million broadband map’s lack of pricing data), because it would only act to highlight market failure, limited competition, and monopolization. This failure to act is very clearly regulatory capture and corruption, as Penn State University’s Sascha Meinrath correctly observes:

Discriminatory pricing in the industry is blatantly obvious, said Sascha Meinrath, Palmer Chair in telecommunications at Penn State University. “The FCC consistently refuses to collect the kind of information that would exonerate ISPs or condemn them,” he stated.  

He warned that this lack of appropriate data collection will be to the detriment of consumers. He accused the FCC of refusing to act against discriminatory and predatory pricing, claiming that it is a prime example of “American corruption.” 

If the FCC cared about high consumer prices, it would at a minimum be willing to track and document those prices to better educate consumers, the press, and policymakers. Or feature Commissioners that can openly criticize how decades of corruption and monopolization have resulted in high prices, spotty coverage, slow speeds, and comically terrible customer service.

The kind of careerists that wind up at the FCC are literally incapable of criticizing telecom giants (find me one instance where Biden FCC boss Jessica Rosenworcel has criticized monopoly power). So they’re just as incapable of implementing pro-competitive policies (like openly advocating for community-owned and operated broadband networks the data very clearly shows result in better, faster, cheaper service).

Instead you get a lot of superficial feel good policies that let the FCC pretend it still cares about consumer protection, like empty rhetoric about the “digital divide,” or nutrition labels that don’t actually inform and consumers may never see. Contributing to broadband access that’s routinely middling on performance but leads the developed world in terms of consumer cost.

Filed Under: broadband, broadband nutrition label, digital divide, fcc, high speed internet, prices, telecom