ISPs to FCC: Listing Every Government Fee on Our Broadband Labels Is Too Hard
Some of America’s bigger internet providers don’t like the taste of one ingredient in a broadband-transparency rule modeled after the FDA’s nutrition labels: a requirement to itemize the non-tax government-related fees they stack on subscriber bills.
These complaints surfaced in a series of filings with the FCC since it approved the broadband-labels rule last November and issued an order implementing it (PDF) that says “providers must list all recurring monthly fees,” including “monthly charges associated with regulatory programs.” The rule does not, however, require breaking out actual taxes, which ISPs can simply say vary by location.
“This new requirement would add unnecessary complexity and burdens to the label for consumers and providers and could result in some providers having to create many labels for any given plan,” the cable industry’s trade group, NCTA, opined in an Aug. 11 filing that relayed the views of three other telecom associations.
That Washington-based lobby instead suggested that the FCC instead either allow providers to say that these fees vary by jurisdiction or show “the maximum level of government-imposed fees that might be passed through.”
It also decried a provision requiring that an ISP “document each instance when it directs a consumer to a label at an alternate sales channel” (for instance, if a phone sales rep tells a caller about it) and keep those records for two years, calling that “wholly unwarranted” and “highly disruptive.”
In a June 8 filing, Comcast raised similar objections, saying that it would already have to write “251 separate broadband consumer labels” without itemizing these fees. The public copy of its letter redacts its estimate of how many more labels it would need to
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