Trump Just Made It Easier For Your ISP To Rip You Off With Bogus Fees

from the this-is-why-we-can’t-have-nice-things dept

Here’s a short crash course in U.S. telecom policy.

Giant and very unpopular companies like Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, and Charter created regional monopolies that work tirelessly to erode all meaningful competition and oversight, resulting in high prices, spotty service, slower speeds, and abysmal customer service. They also pay a bunch of dodgy pseudo-academic “free market” think tanks to insist this is all very innovative and exciting.

Every so often a few Democrats (the handful not too timid to stand up to the telecom lobby) propose the absolute bare minimum policy “solution” that usually involves nibbling around the edges of the actual problem (unchecked monopoly power coddled by corruption). These efforts are very often highly decorative and performative, and very rarely competently enforced.

Enter Republicans, who work seamlessly with the telecom lobby to destroy even these bare-bones proposals, framing them as radical. The result: no real oversight of telecom giants, who then double down on all of their worst behaviors.

This just happens again and again and again in U.S. policy (privacy, net neutrality, predatory business practices). And will keep happening until the U.S. addresses its corruption problems. Which, with a minimum 2.5 years of Trumpism left, doesn’t seem likely anytime soon.

The latest case in point: back during the Biden era, the FCC under Jessica Rosenworcel proposed a new “nutrition label for broadband” that required ISPs break down each individual fee and restriction on your bill. Note it didn’t actually stop ISPs from ripping you off, it just created a mostly voluntary system whereby ISPs were politely asked to list the real price of service, including usage caps and bullshit fees.

Studies found that unsurprisingly, most ISPs didn’t comply and the FCC, even under Biden, didn’t really enforce the rules.

Despite this being, once again, a bare minimum policy effort that didn’t even actually fix the underlying problem and was never meaningfully enforced, the telecom lobby very much didn’t like the idea of having to be transparent. Or the government telling them what to do. So they’ve lobbied the Trump administration to dismantle the requirements:

“The Federal Communications Commission will vote to eliminate a rule that requires Internet service providers to list all of their so-called “passthrough” fees on an easily accessible broadband price label. The FCC vote could also make the price labels themselves a bit harder for consumers to find.”

Great stuff. Very populist. Who wasn’t begging the government to make it easier for big shitty companies to rip you off with bullshit surcharges and fees?

Keep in mind it took the U.S. government thirty-five years of telecom monopoly predation to finally come up with the idea “maybe we politely ask giant telecom monopolies to be semi-honest about their price.” But even that was a bridge too far for a corrupt U.S. federal government.

It should be noted that this most recent “nutrition label” approach was technically required by Congress, which was trying to ensure that the $42.5 billion in broadband subsidies in the infrastructure bill resulted in semi-decent broadband. But as I’ve been exploring, the Trump administration has hijacked that program to slather Elon Musk with subsidies, stripping all meaningful oversight in the process.

Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr’s order rolling back the rules tries to pretend they’re doing this for the sake of consumer clarity:

“However, the Commission’s initial rules, adopted in 2022, resulted in sometimes confusing labels that strayed beyond the statutory framework Congress created, increasing compliance costs for providers in the process. With this order, we refocus the rules on ensuring that consumers have the clear, accurate, and concise information about broadband plans that they want, making the labels a more useful shopping tool.”

That is a blatant lie. Carr is simply folding like a weakling to the demands of Comcast, AT&T and friends. There is no consumer benefit to making broadband pricing less transparent. It simply works to further obscure the real problem: regional monopoly predation, coddled by captured regulators like Carr. Comcast didn’t like having to be even semi-honest about precisely how it rips you off.

To try and avoid making it clear he’s breaking the law and ignoring Congress, Carr is pretending the labels will technically still exist. They will, of course, feature fewer requirements, be harder to find, and there will be absolutely no enforcement should ISPs balk at the rules.

Carr has more important things to do, like dismantling the First Amendment because a comedian made fun of the president’s wife, or eliminating bare-bones regulations to make life even easier on shitty robocallers, prison phone monopolies, and telecom giants.

The United States is not a serious country. It’s too corrupt to function in the public interest. And it’s become a strange combination of painful, boring, and pathetic that we have journalists, policymakers, think tankers, and regulators too feckless or captured to be honest about any of it.

Filed Under: brendan carr, broadband, fcc, fees, high speed internet, internet access, nutrition label, regulatory recovery fee, surcharges, usage caps