Your ISP Now Requires A Broadband ‘Nutrition Label’ To Clearly Show You You’re Being Ripped Off
from the transparently-terrible dept
After countless years pondering the idea, the FCC in 2022 announced that it would start politely asking the nation’s lumbering telecom monopolies to affix a sort of “nutrition label” on to broadband connections. The labels will clearly disclose the speed and latency (ping) of your connection, any hidden fees users will encounter, and whether the connection comes with usage caps or “overage fees.”
Initially just a voluntary measure, bigger ISPs had to start using the labels back in April. Smaller ISPs had to start using them as of October 10. In most instances they’re supposed to look something like this:
As far as regulatory efforts go, it’s not the worst idea. Transparency is lacking in broadband land, and U.S. broadband and cable companies have a 30+ year history of ripping off consumers with an absolute cavalcade of weird restrictions, fees, surcharges, and connection limitations.
Here’s the thing though: transparently knowing you’re being ripped off doesn’t necessarily stop you from being ripped off. A huge number of Americans live under a broadband monopoly or duopoly, meaning they have no other choice in broadband access. As such, Comcast or AT&T or Verizon can rip you off, and you have absolutely no alternative options that allow you to vote with your wallet.
That wouldn’t be as much of a problem if U.S. federal regulators had any interest in reining in regional telecom monopoly power, but they don’t. In fact, members of both parties are historically incapable of even admitting monopoly harm exists. Democrats are notably better at at least trying to do something, even if that something often winds up being decorative regulatory theater.
The other problem: with the help of a corrupt Supreme Court, telecoms and their Republican and libertarian besties are currently engaged in an effort to dismantle what’s left of the FCC’s consumer protection authority under the pretense this unleashes “free market innovation.” It, of course, doesn’t; regional monopolies like Comcast just double down on all of their worst impulses, unchecked.
If successful, even fairly basic efforts like this one won’t be spared, as the FCC won’t have the authority to enforce much of anything.
It’s all very demonstrative of a U.S. telecom industry that’s been broken by monopoly power, a lack of competition, and regulatory capture. As a result, even the most basic attempts at consumer protection are constantly undermined by folks who’ve dressed up greed as some elaborate and intellectual ethos.
Filed Under: broadband, consumers, fcc, fees, high speed internet, nutrition label, telecom, usage caps
Comments on “Your ISP Now Requires A Broadband ‘Nutrition Label’ To Clearly Show You You’re Being Ripped Off”
That sounds familiar
America has never been a country for free markets except as a smoke screen to shut down any competition.
America loves monopolists.
That whole tea thing?
Very effective marketing.
Complete bollox.
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They love monopolists and also hate monopolists and want to punish monopolists in ways that hurt everyone but the monopolists (see KOSA, killing section 230, every other bad tech regulation in circulation globablly, etc.)
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‘They’ being the monopolists, love themselves while also hating themselves and want to self punsish .. wow ‘they’ sure seem to be messed up.
Meanwhile, the rest of ‘us’ are quite sick of the bullshit.
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There is nothing I would love more than for all this polarized, bullshit and lie-filled caught-between-fascists-and-nanny-state bullshit circus to stop.
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KOSA was never ABOUT monopolies – it was always about CENSORSHIP of children.
“The labels will clearly disclose the speed and latency (ping) of your connection.”
Hah! Even that’s dishonest. At least one of our local ISPs has a method of detecting a speed test and temporarily increasing the speed…for pings.
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That (detecting pings) is pretty easy if the tool you’re using is utilizing ICMP. (And that’s what most tools use: ICMP_ECHO_REQUEST to be specific.) It’s more difficult if you’re using other protocols…but not impossible.
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Some routines, used to measure speed, will upload a file and do measurements, likewise for d/l.
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Well, it doesn’t really matter much if latency is actually measured in Ms, rather than ms. 1Ms is about 11.6 days 🙂
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And yet, somehow, they knew just enough to not make the mistake of labeling it in megasiemens. I’ll be amused if some ISP writes a value like 1 × 10⁻⁹.
They also don’t say what’s being measured. Is that one-way latency, from the time the ISP sends you a packet till you receive it? A round-trip (“ping time”) to Google? If the ISP gives you a wi-fi router, do they have to account for the wi-fi latency?
Also remember that every 200 km of fiber adds about 1 ms of latency, which means that sufficiently rural areas, or areas not near major data centers, may need custom labels..
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Well then it sounds like it’s time to get a Raspberry Pi and have it do speed tests every few seconds!
They should have to list uptime as well
There should also be a field for uptime, or a guarantee that users won’t be charged during outages.
Cox in Vegas is down for hours every month, so that working from home means using mobile data (extra $10 for my Google Fi last month). Fiber can’t come soon enough to my ‘hood.
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They’re a cable company. Is any cable company good at this? In Canada, Rogers will sometimes put out a sign like “we’re working on cable in this neighbourhood, and your internet connection may go down for a while”. It also used to go down frequently overnight, with no warning, as did Cogeco (another Canadian cable provider).
The telephone companies still seem pretty reliable by comparison; I almost never get outages. Indiana Bell even managed to move its telephone exchange without dropping a call, and that was a hundred years ago when such things were actually hard.
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That’s not an unreasonable request. Electric utilities have reliability metrics such as SAIDI that are integral to cost recovery. Any regulated monopoly should have similar metrics that are used by the utility board and could be printed.
Not just that, but ISPs have an obsession with saddling users with additional hidden charges, then whining about it when the FCC asks them to show them. It won’t surprise me if ISPs use this nutrition label as an excuse to saddle users with yet another fee, and then – in true Richard Bennett fashion – blame the users for bringing it on themselves.
Hell, I’m not even sure ISPs would be honest about the transparency nutrition label. What’s in it for them to do so? There’s nothing stopping them from lying about it – particularly when the strongest penalty they get is the FCC giving them a stern frown in their general direction.
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the past 2 articles that Karl Bode as put out was noting but pure anti gop/trump he just needs to lay off of the BS
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Translation: “Karl Bode possesses the ability to perceive reality accurately and I’m upset he doesn’t buy into the same propaganda that I have.”