Trump FCC Is Making It Easier For Your Broadband ISP To Rip You Off With Bogus Fees

from the dysfunction-junction dept

When FCC boss Brendan Carr isn’t failing embarrassingly to censor comedians who make the President sad, he’s taking a hatchet to corporate oversight and consumer protection. From weakening robocall enforcement to killing net neutrality, it’s part of Carr’s “Delete, Delete, Delete” performance that is attempting to dress up corruption and regulatory capture as streamlined government efficiency.

This week, Carr began taking aim at recently passed rules requiring that your broadband ISP be clear about all the sneaky fees and restrictions they impose on your broadband line. Mandated by the 2021 infrastructure bill, the new FCC rules required that ISPs provide a sort of “nutrition label” at the point of sale for broadband access, itemizing all fees, caps, and other restrictions.

It was ideally supposed to look like this:

These labels began appearing last year. The effort came after decades of incidents where regional monopolies would (falsely) advertise one price, then sock you with a bevy of predatory, misleading fees with nonsensical names like “administrative and telco recovery charge,” or “internet cost recovery fee.”

Now Carr is looking to kill those requirements. Since it was mandated by Congress, Carr can’t gleefully say he’s killing the rule. But Carr has scheduled an October 28 vote on a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that aims to weaken the rules by making it so big ISPs like Comcast no longer have to clearly itemize all their sneaky, shitty fees. The whole point of the effort.

In a blog post (which you should read the first few paragraphs of to appreciate Carr’s “humor”), Carr tries to pass this off as an efficient improvement of consumer protection:

“We want consumers to get quick and easy access to the information they want and need to compare broadband plans (as Congress has provided) without imposing unnecessary burdens.”

Big ISPs like Comcast have repeatedly whined to the FCC about the rule, claiming it’s simply too onerous to have to list all of the bullshit fees they’ve made up to mislead consumers. This despite the fact that the FCC (under either administration) has never bothered to actually enforce the rule, and a recent study found that most ISPs are doing a fairly middling job actually adhering to the requirements.

To be clear: Brendan Carr is coddling the telecom industry so he can get a cushy job after he leaves the agency. But like everything Carr does, this is all dressed up as serious adult policy and an act of efficiency everyone should be grateful for. But it’s clear that after Carr weakens the rules there’s no chance in hell he ever actually enforces them. You’ll never get a post-office telecom think tank job doing that sort of thing.

I criticized the rules when proposed, noting that they were a decorative effort that took aim at the symptom (high prices, consumer aggression) of the real disease (consolidated monopoly power protected by corruption and regulatory capture). Former Biden FCC boss Jessica Rosenworcel couldn’t even openly admit that telecom monopolization was a problem, much less propose a fix.

Requiring Comcast to be transparent about the fact they’re ripping you off — while doing nothing about Comcast actually ripping you off — is a performance.

It may have been a well-intentioned performance by Rosenworcel, but it was an example of how U.S. telecom policy is a sad joke. Republicans unabashedly coddle our telecom monopolies, and Democrats propose half-solutions because more than half the party is terrified of upsetting major campaign contributors bone-grafted to our domestic surveillance systems. Anybody who might actually disrupt this dynamic (see: what happened to Gigi Sohn) can’t make it through the corrupt Senate approval process.

The result is a sloppy mess of substandard, overpriced internet access dominated by bad actors in a country that somehow can’t stop talking about how technologically innovative and clever it is.

Filed Under: brendan carr, broadband, broadband label, fcc, fees, jessica rosenworcel, labeling, monopoly, pricing, telecom, transparency