The FCC has issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that proposes to simplify the rules for broadband labels. This effort demonstrates the need to simplify regulations while also highlighting the absurdity of many regulations.
The Rulemaking is specifically recommending to eliminate the following requirements:
- Read the label to consumers over the phone
- Itemize state and local pass-through fees that vary depending on the location of the consumer
- Provide information about the now-concluded Affordable Connectivity Program
- Display labels in customer account portals
- Make labels available in machine-readable format
- Archive labels for at least two years after a service is no longer offered to new customers
The Rulemaking also seeks comments on several issues:
- Whether to eliminate the multilingual display requirement.
- Are there other requirements that are unduly burdensome and provide minimal benefit to consumers.
- Removing the label template from the CFR.
The fact that the FCC is proposing these changes highlights the absurdity of some regulations. The original label rules were too specific and burdensome. For example, requiring an ISP to somehow show the right local taxes for each customer based on address is absurd. Many taxes change regularly and it was never practical for a company operating in multiple states to do this. The rule that a company had to read a label over the phone was ridiculous. Go try to do that – it takes a long time to read through a single label, and much of the language ISPs put on labels is written in legalese and not easy for consumers to understand.
The real issue that is not being addressed is that the labels are not meeting the original intended purpose. The main reason the label rules were created was to provide consumers with an easy way to comparison-shop between different ISPs in a market. The labels have failed to meet the original goal.
Many ISPs make labels hard to find on a website. When you find the labels, a consumer often has to provide a specific street address, which many people are not willing to do to avoid being pestered by marketing material. It’s largely impossible to compare ISP speeds and performance because ISPs are allowed to claim marketing ‘up to’ speeds on the labels, which often have no similarity to the actual speeds that can be delivered.
The labels are also supposed to explain the technology used in plain English. I defy anybody who is not a technical industry insider to understand this portion of the labels. I’ve read some that were so nebulous that I was not sure what technology was being deployed.
The only good feature of the labels that I can see is that ISPs have to disclose the list prices that customers are charged at the end of any special or promotional pricing.
It also doesn’t look like the FCC is monitoring to see that ISPs have labels. I’ve found a lot of smaller ISPs that either don’t have labels or have hidden them so well they can’t be found. The bottom line of this rulemaking is that the FCC wants to make the labels a little easier for ISPs, but not any more usable for consumers.
The labels are absurd. maybe well intentioned, but it would be like having a nutrition label on food that had to describe the ingredients of the packaging material but not the organics inside. I’ll ride this analogy a little harder, the nutrition label already has the content’s weight and the price tag is right there. The rest of the label is mostly meaningless.
There’s a threshold for where an internet service is adequate or good and beyond that it’s not much of a determining factor for quality. deciding if a 300Mbps service or a 1Gbps services is better has so little do to with those speeds…
Latency to the edge of the network is also not very useful, unless you’re going to show latency to common internet resources as a benchmark then what is on the broadband label is essentially a lie.
The point about taxes is a good one, but I’d argue maybe one of the easier ones to handle because a business already has to have their tax codes in their accounting system so doing an address lookup to tax codes for muni and state taxes is just a small burden.
The price list really isn’t the FCC’s business. Essentially no other business is required to have price lists on their websites.
I’m not completely naysaying the whole thing, I do think transparence is lacking in the industry. Such as the prices advertised or offered should be complete, not with extras tacked on the bill. However, more information isn’t always better, and when that information is a (poor) substitute for maintaining reputation because ‘the government label’ is what says how good a services is, that hurts some key capitalist machinery.