An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The Federal Communications Commission has approved (PDF) a new set of rules aiming to prevent "digital discrimination." It means the agency can hold telecom companies accountable for digitally discriminating against customers -- or giving certain communities poorer service (or none at all) based on income level, race, or religion. The new rules come as part of the Biden Administration's 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which requires the FCC to develop and adopt anti-digital discrimination rules. "Many of the communities that lack adequate access to broadband today are the same areas that suffer from longstanding patterns of residential segregation and economic disadvantage," FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said following today's vote. "It shows that minority status and income correlate with broadband access."

Under the new rules, the FCC can fine telecom companies for not providing equal connectivity to different communities "without adequate justification," such as financial or technical challenges of building out service in a particular area. The rules are specifically designed to address correlations between household income, race, and internet speed. Last year, a joint report from The Markup and the Associated Press found that AT&T, Verizon, and other internet service providers offer different speeds depending on the neighborhood in cities throughout the US. The report revealed neighborhoods with lower incomes and fewer white people get stuck with slower internet while still having to pay the same price as those with faster speeds. At the time, USTelecom, an organization that represents major telecom providers, blamed the higher price on having to maintain older equipment in certain communities.

The FCC was nearly divided on the new set of rules, as it passed with a 3-2 vote. Critics of the new policy argue the rules are an overextension of the FCC's power. Jonathan Spalter, the CEO of USTelecom, says the FCC is "taking overly intrusive, unworkably vague, and ultimately harmful steps in the wrong direction." Spalter adds the framework "is counter" to Congress' goal of giving customers equal access to the internet. Still, supporters of the new rules believe they can go a long way toward improving fractured broadband coverage throughout the US. The FCC will also establish an "improved" customer portal, where the agency will field and review complaints about digital discrimination. It will take things like broadband deployment, network upgrades, and maintenance across communities into account when evaluating providers for potential rule violations, giving it the authority to hopefully finally address the disparities in internet access throughout the US.

The FAA has cleared SpaceX to launch its second spaceflight attempt of its Starship rocket. CNBC reports: SpaceX posted on the social media platform X shortly after the greenlight that it was "targeting Friday, November 17 for Starship's second flight test." A two-hour launch window will begin at 8 a.m. ET. SpaceX plans to livestream the Starship launch, with a webcast beginning about 30 minutes before lift off. Starship first launched in April, achieving flight for a few minutes before exploding mid-air, severely damaging the ground infrastructure and raising environmental concerns. The FAA in coordination with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service launched a safety review prior to issuing a new flight license for the second attempt.

FWS determined that the rocket launch and subsequent damage to the pad infrastructure had no long-term negative effects on the surrounding ecology, according to an agency report released Wednesday. Still, SpaceX will help mitigate damage to the area by reducing sound waves and vibrations, assisting in fire suppression, and providing launch pad protection, the agency said. As a result, "the FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy and financial responsibility requirements," the agency said in a statement Wednesday.

This week the Verge's podcast Decoder interviewed former U.S. president Barack Obama for a discussion on "AI, free speech, and the future of the internet."

Obama warns that future copyright questions are just part of a larger issue. "If AI turns out to be as pervasive and as powerful as it's proponents expect — and I have to say the more I look into it, I think it is going to be that disruptive — we are going to have to think about not just intellectual property; we are going to have to think about jobs and the economy differently."

Specific issues may include the length of the work week and the fact that health insurance coverage is currently tied to employment — but it goes far beyond that: The broader question is going to be what happens when 10% of existing jobs now definitively can be done by some large language model or other variant of AI? And are we going to have to reexamine how we educate our kids and what jobs are going to be available...?

The truth of the matter is that during my presidency, there was I think a little bit of naivete, where people would say, you know, "The answer to lifting people out of poverty and making sure they have high enough wages is we're going to retrain them and we're going to educate them, and they should all become coders, because that's the future." Well, if AI's coding better than all but the very best coders? If ChatGPT can generate a research memo better than the third-, fourth-year associate — maybe not the partner, who's got a particular expertise or judgment? — now what are you telling young people coming up?
While Obama believes in the transformative potential of AI, "we have to be maybe a little more intentional about how our democracies interact with what is primarily being generated out of the private sector. What rules of the road are we setting up, and how can we make sure that we maximize the good and maybe minimize some of the bad?"

AI's impact will be a global problem, Obama believes, which may require "cross-border frameworks and standards and norms". (He expressed a hope that governments can educate the public on the idea that AI is "a tool, not a buddy".) During the 44-minute interview Obama predicted AI will ultimately force a "much more robust" public conversation about rules needed for social media — and that at least some of that pressure could come from how consumers interact with companies. (Obama also argues there will still be a market for products that don't just show you what you want to see.)

"One of Obama's worries is that the government needs insight and expertise to properly regulate AI," writes the Verge's editor-in-chief in an article about the interview, "and you'll hear him make a pitch for why people with that expertise should take a tour of duty in the government to make sure we get these things right." You'll hear me get excited about a case called Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC, a 1969 Supreme Court decision that said the government could impose something called the Fairness Doctrine on radio and television broadcasters because the public owns the airwaves and can thus impose requirements on how they're used. There's no similar framework for cable TV or the internet, which don't use public airwaves, and that makes them much harder, if not impossible, to regulate. Obama says he disagrees with the idea that social networks are something called "common carriers" that have to distribute all information equally.
Obama also applauded last month's newly-issued Executive Order from the White House, a hundred-page document which Obama calls important as "the beginning of building out a framework." We don't know all the problems that are going to arise out of this. We don't know all the promising potential of AI, but we're starting to put together the foundations for what we hope will be a smart framework for dealing with it... In talking to the companies themselves, they will acknowledge that their safety protocols and their testing regimens may not be where they need to be yet. I think it's entirely appropriate for us to plant a flag and say, "All right, frontier companies, you need to disclose what your safety protocols are to make sure that we don't have rogue programs going off and hacking into our financial system," for example. Tell us what tests you're using. Make sure that we have some independent verification that right now this stuff is working.

But that framework can't be a fixed framework. These models are developing so quickly that oversight and any regulatory framework is going to have to be flexible, and it's going to have to be nimble.

Internet service providers and their lobby groups are fighting a US plan to prohibit discrimination in access to broadband services. In particular, ISPs want the Federal Communications Commission to drop the plan's proposal to require that prices charged to consumers be non-discriminatory. From a report: In 2021, Congress required the Federal Communications Commission to issue rules "preventing digital discrimination of access based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin" within two years. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel last month released her draft plan to comply with the congressional mandate and scheduled a November 15 commission vote on adopting final rules. The plan is likely to pass in a party-line vote as Rosenworcel has a 3-2 Democratic majority, but aspects of the draft could be changed before the vote. Next week's meeting could be a contentious one, judging by a statement issued Monday by Republican Commissioner Brendan Carr.

Carr described Rosenworcel's proposal as "President Biden's plan to give the administrative state effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure in the US." He also objects to the Rosenworcel plan's statement that the FCC rules may apply to entities that are not broadband providers, such as landlords, if they "impede equal access to broadband Internet access service." Consumer advocates generally support the proposal but say the planned system for handling complaints, ISP responses, and investigations is not transparent enough, reducing the system's potential to act as a deterrent. Consumer advocates also say Internet users who have already been harmed by discrimination may not get any relief because the proposed rules do not apply retroactively. ISPs including Comcast, Charter, AT&T, and Verizon have held a flurry of meetings with FCC officials and commissioners in which they argued that the rules are too broad.

The Washington Post's editorial board looks at America's "net neutrality" debate.

But first they note that America's communications-regulating FCC has "limited authority to regulate unless broadband is considered a 'common carrier' under the Telecommunications Act of 1996." The FCC under President Barack Obama moved to reclassify broadband so it could regulate broadband companies; the FCC under President Donald Trump reversed the change. Dismayed advocates warned the world that, without the protections in place, the internet would break. You'll never guess what happened next: nothing. Or, at least, almost nothing. The internet did not break, and internet service providers for the most part did not block and they did not throttle.

All the same, today's FCC, under Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, has just moved to re-reclassify broadband. The interesting part is that her strongest argument doesn't have much to do with net neutrality, but with some of the other benefits the country could see from having a federal watchdog keeping an eye on the broadband business... Broadband is an essential service... Yet there isn't a single government agency with sufficient authority to oversee this vital tool. Asserting federal authority over broadband would empower regulation of any blocking, throttling or anti-competitive paid traffic prioritization that they might engage in. But it could also help ensure the safety and security of U.S. networks.

The FCC has, on national security grounds, removed authorization for companies affiliated with adversary states, such as China's Huawei, from participating in U.S. telecommunications markets. The agency can do this for phone carriers. But it can't do it for broadband, because it isn't allowed to. Or consider public safety during a crisis. The FCC doesn't have the ability to access the data it needs to know when and where there are broadband outages — much less the ability to do anything about those outages if they are identified. Similarly, it can't impose requirements for network resiliency to help prevent those outages from occurring in the first place — during, say, a natural disaster or a cyberattack.

The agency has ample power to police the types of services that are becoming less relevant in American life, such as landline telephones, and little power to police those that are becoming more important every day.
The FCC acknowledges this power would also allow them to prohibit "throttling" of content. But the Post's editorial also makes the argument that here in 2023 that's "unlikely to have any major effect on the broadband industry in either direction... Substantial consequences have only become less likely as high-speed bandwidth has become less limited."

"Twenty phone companies may soon have all their voice calls blocked by US carriers," reports Ars Technica, "because they didn't submit real plans for preventing robocalls on their networks." The 20 carriers include a mix of US-based and foreign voice service providers that submitted required "robocall mitigation" plans to the Federal Communications Commission about two years ago. The problem is that some of the carriers' submissions were blank pages and others were bizarre images or documents that had no relation to robocalls. The strange submissions, according to FCC enforcement orders issued Monday, included "a .PNG file depicting an indiscernible object," a document titled "Windows Printer Test Page," an image "that depicted the filer's 'Taxpayer Profile' on a Pakistani government website," and "a letter that stated: 'Unfortunately, we do not have such a documents.'"

Monday's FCC announcement said the agency's Enforcement Bureau issued orders demanding that "20 non-compliant companies show cause within 14 days as to why the FCC should not remove them from the database for deficient filings." The orders focus on the certification requirements and do not indicate whether these companies carry large amounts of robocall traffic. Each company will be given "an opportunity to cure any deficiencies in its robocall mitigation program description or explain why its certification is not deficient." After the October 30 deadline, the companies could be removed from the FCC's Robocall Mitigation Database.

Removal from the database would oblige other phone companies to block all of their calls.

The FCC has unanimously approved plans by several tech companies to use the 6GHz band for wireless devices. From a report: FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel proposed the new rules, which would authorize very low power (VLP) operations -- meaning their signals won't be able to go very far -- in about 850MHz of the spectrum, on September 27th. The rules will also allow devices to "use higher power levels" so long as they're geofenced to keep from interfering with actual licensed 6GHz usage, and the FCC will be taking comments on other ways it can expand 6GHz spectrum usage by technology devices.

A September Bloomberg report pointed to some of the kinds of devices the FCC's affirmative vote could open up, including in-car connections, mobile virtual or augmented reality devices, and more. The FCC originally opened up 1,200MHz of the 6GHz spectrum for unlicensed use by Wi-Fi routers and client devices (think smartphones or laptops), giving home networks far more wireless overhead than existing Wi-Fi standards already had. This new approval expands the spectrum for much more general use.

The U.S. FCC voted Thursday to advance a proposal to reinstate landmark net neutrality rules and assume new regulatory oversight of broadband internet that was rescinded under former President Donald Trump. From a report: In a 3-2 party-line vote, the FCC approved Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), which seeks public comment on the broadband regulation plan. The comment period will officially open after the proposal is published in the Federal Register, but the docket is already active and can be found here. The proposal would reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service, a designation that allows the FCC to regulate ISPs under the common-carrier provisions in Title II of the Communications Act. The plan is essentially the same as what the FCC did in 2015 when it used Title II to prohibit fixed and mobile Internet providers from blocking or throttling traffic or giving priority to Web services in exchange for payment.

The Obama-era net neutrality rules were eliminated during Trump's presidency when then-Chairman Ajit Pai led a repeal that reclassified broadband as an information service, returning it to the less strict regulatory regime of Title I. The current FCC likely would have acted much sooner but there was a 2-2 deadlock until last month when the Senate confirmed Biden nominee Anna Gomez to fill the empty spot. After the comment period, the FCC is likely to finalize the rulemaking and put the 2015 rules back in place. The broadband industry will likely then sue the FCC in an attempt to nullify the rulemaking.

As the FCC leans towards reinstating net neutrality and regulating ISPs under Title II, the broadband sector is set to challenge the move. Previously, courts have upheld FCC's decisions. However, legal experts believe the Supreme Court's current stance may hinder the FCC's authority to classify broadband as a telecommunications service. ArsTechnica: The major question here is whether the FCC has authority to decide that broadband is a telecommunications service, which is important because only telecommunications services can be regulated under Title II's common-carrier framework. "A Commission decision reclassifying broadband as a Title II telecommunications service will not survive a Supreme Court encounter with the major questions doctrine. It would be folly for the Commission and Congress to assume otherwise," two former Obama administration solicitors general, Donald Verrilli, Jr. and Ian Heath Gershengorn, argued in a white paper last month. According to Verrilli and Gershengorn, "There is every reason to think that a majority of the Supreme Court" would vote against the FCC.

Verrilli and Gershengorn express their view with a striking level of certainty given how difficult it usually is to predict a Supreme Court outcome -- particularly in a case like this, where the agency decision isn't even finalized. While litigation in lower courts is to be expected, it's not even clear that the Supreme Court will take up the case at all. The certainty expressed by Verrilli and Gershengorn is less surprising when you consider that their white paper was funded by USTelecom and NCTA -- The Internet & Television Association, two broadband industry trade groups that sued the Obama-era FCC in a failed attempt to overturn the net neutrality rules. The groups -- which represent firms like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and Charter -- eventually got their way when then-FCC Chairman Ajit Pai led a repeal of the rules in 2017. But the industry-funded white paper has gotten plenty of attention, and the FCC is keenly aware of the so-called "major questions doctrine" that it describes. The FCC's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), which is pending a commission vote, will seek public comment on how the major questions doctrine might affect Title II regulation and net neutrality rules that would prohibit blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization.

The Biden administration has urged the FCC to adopt strong rules to redress historic shortfalls that have left some communities lacking adequate broadband service. From a report: The position sets up a possible clash with large broadband providers that have warned the FCC, which is set to produce rules by next month, against unnecessary regulations. Clear rules are needed to close the digital divide that leaves millions without adequate broadband, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration said in a statement. The Commerce Department unit advises the president and develops internet policy. "Strong rules are needed to remedy unequal access to internet service, no matter what the cause may be," said Alan Davidson, the assistant secretary of commerce for communications and information, who is also the NTIA's top official. "Rules that combat digital discrimination will bring lasting relief to vulnerable communities that historically have been left behind online."

The FCC is considering regulations to prevent and eliminate digital discrimination of access based on income level, race and other factors, according to Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel. Broadband advocates have told the agency they want deep changes that will steer spending into cities. Some urban neighborhoods have suffered from disinvestment dating back to redlining decades ago, when government-aided discriminatory lending patterns starved neighborhoods of housing resources. Many of those areas still aren't prosperous, and haven't seen network upgrades.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Your electronic devices may alarm you on Wednesday afternoon — but there's a reason for that. A nationwide test of the federal emergency alert system will be broadcast at approximately 2:20 p.m. EDT to cellphones, televisions and radios across the United States at around the same time. Most Americans with wireless cellular devices will receive an emergency alert message, as will most whose televisions or radios are on when the test occurs.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency will conduct Wednesday's test in coordination with the Federal Communications Commission. Emergency alert messages that make up the test are divided into two groups -- the Emergency Alert System (EAS) for radios and televisions, and the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) for wireless phones -- although both are scheduled to happen at once. Wednesday will mark the seventh nationwide test of the Emergency Alert System. Six previous tests were conducted over the years between November 2011 and August 2021. This will be the third nationwide test of wireless alerts, and the second nationwide test transmitted to all cellphones, FEMA said in a statement. As the wireless alert tests are sent out to phones, the Emergency Alert System tests will be sent out to televisions and radios.

People can elect not to receive certain emergency alert messages to their cellphones from local authorities, or in some instances, simply decide whether to subscribe or not to a specific set of emergency alerts put out by a particular agency. On the other hand, it is not possible to opt out of the upcoming test of the national wireless alert system. All major wireless providers participate in FEMA's wireless alert system. So, most people whose cellphones are turned on and located within range of an active cell tower during the test should receive a message, the agency said (PDF).

Todd Shields and Loren Grush reporting via Bloomberg: Dish Network Corp. was fined $150,000 by US regulators for leaving a retired satellite parked in the wrong place in space, reflecting official concern over the growing amount of debris orbiting Earth and the potential for mishaps. The Federal Communications Commission called the action its first to enforce safeguards against orbital debris. "This is a breakthrough settlement, making very clear the FCC has strong enforcement authority and capability to enforce its vitally important space debris rules," Loyaan A. Egal, the agency's enforcement bureau chief, said in a statement.

Dish's EchoStar-7 satellite, which relayed pay-TV signals, ran short of fuel, and the company retired it at an altitude roughly 76 miles (122 kilometers) above its operational orbit. It was supposed to have been parked 186 miles above its operational orbit, the FCC said in an order (PDF). The company admitted it failed to park EchoStar-7 as authorized. It agreed to implement a compliance plan and pay a $150,000 civil penalty, the FCC said.

New submitter AsylumWraith shares a report: The US government aims to restore sweeping regulations for high-speed internet providers, such as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, reviving "net neutrality" rules for the broadband industry -- and an ongoing debate about the internet's future. The proposed rules from the Federal Communications Commission will designate internet service -- both the wired kind found in homes and businesses as well as mobile data on cellphones -- as "essential telecommunications" akin to traditional telephone services, according to multiple people familiar with the plan. The rules would ban internet service providers (ISPs) from blocking or slowing down access to websites and online content, the people told CNN.

Agency chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel plans to unveil the proposal in a speech at the National Press Club on Tuesday, the people added, saying the FCC plans to vote Oct. 19 on whether to advance the draft rules by soliciting public feedback on them -- a step that would precede the creation of any final rules. In addition to the prohibitions on blocking and throttling internet traffic, the draft rules also seek to prevent ISPs from selectively speeding up service to favored websites or to those that agree to pay extra fees, the people added, a move designed to prevent the emergence of "fast lanes" on the web that could give some websites a paid advantage over others.

The Federal Communications Commission is taking steps to restrict Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers from easily accessing US telephone numbers. Over the past several years, robocallers have exploited VoIP providers to inundate US citizens with unwanted calls, many of which come from falsified numbers. Previously, the regulations allowed VoIP services relatively uncomplicated access to US phone numbers. ArsTechnica: But under rules adopted by the FCC yesterday, VoIP providers will face some extra hurdles. They will have to "make robocall-related certifications to help ensure compliance with the Commission's rules targeting illegal robocalls," and "disclose and keep current information about their ownership, including foreign ownership, to mitigate the risk of providing bad actors abroad with access to US numbering resources," the FCC said. The FCC order will take effect 30 days after it's published in the Federal Register. A public draft of the order was released ahead of the FCC meeting.

Parents in the U.S. whose children purchased items in the popular game Fortnite without their permission will be able to claim a refund from today. The BBC reports: The U.S. regulator accused the game of tricking players into making unintended purchases and breaching privacy. Fortnite developer Epic Games agreed to pay $245 million in refunds in 2022. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has now begun the process of contacting 37 million people to alert them to the compensation.

The FTC said Epic Games duped players with "deceptive interfaces" that could trigger purchases while the game loaded, and accused it of having default settings that breached people's privacy. In total, it agreed to a settlement of $520 million with Epic Games over the concerns. This includes a $275 million fine relating to how Fortnite collects data on its users, including those aged under 13, without informing parents. It is the largest fine ever levied by the FTC for breaking a rule. The rest of the settlement will be paid out as refunds.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A suspicious phone company is on the verge of having all its calls blocked by US-based telcos after being accused of ignoring orders to investigate and block robocalls. One Owl Telecom is a US-based gateway provider that routes phone calls from outside the U.S. to consumer phone companies such as Verizon. "Robocalls on One Owl's network apparently bombarded consumers without their consent with prerecorded messages about fictitious orders," the Federal Communications Commission said yesterday.

On August 1, the FCC sent One Owl a Notification of Suspected Illegal Robocall Traffic (PDF) ordering it to investigate robocall traffic identified by USTelecom's Industry Traceback Group, block all of the identified traffic within 14 days, and "continue to block the identified gateway traffic as well as substantially similar traffic on an ongoing basis." One Owl apparently hasn't taken any of the required steps, the FCC said yesterday. "One Owl never responded, and the [FCC Enforcement] Bureau is not aware of any measures One Owl has taken to comply with the Notice," an FCC order said.

Blocking robocall traffic from companies like One Owl is a bit like playing whack-a-mole. The FCC said it previously took enforcement actions "against two other entities to whom One Owl is closely related: Illum Telecommunication Limited and One Eye LLC. While operating under different corporate names, these entities have shared personnel, IP addresses, customers, and a penchant for disregarding FCC rules." If One Owl doesn't provide an adequate response within 14 days, all phone companies receiving calls from it "will then be required to block and cease accepting all traffic received from One Owl beginning 30 days after release of the Final Determination Order," the FCC said. "One Owl faces a simple choice -- comply or lose access to U.S. communications networks," FCC Enforcement Bureau Chief Loyaan Egal said in a press release.

Internet services has long been slow for the Winnebago Tribe in the state of Nebraska, reports the Wall Street Journal. Now the U.S. government "plans to fix that by crisscrossing the reservation with fiber-optic cable — at an average cost of $53,000 for each household and workplace connected."

While that amount exceeds the assessed value of some of the 658 homes getting hookups — at a cost of $35.2 million — "the tribe is also starting an internet company to run the network, creating jobs and competing with an existing provider known for slow customer service." While most connections will cost far less, the expense to reach some remote communities has triggered concerns over the ultimate price tag for ensuring every rural home, business, school and workplace in America has the same internet that city dwellers enjoy... The U.S. has committed more than $60 billion for what the Biden administration calls the "Internet for All" program, the latest in a series of sometimes troubled efforts to bring high-speed internet to rural areas... Providing fiber-optic cable is the industry standard, but alternative options such as satellite service are cheaper, if less reliable. Congress has left it up to state and federal officials implementing the program to decide how much is too much in hard-to-reach areas...

Defenders of the broadband programs say a simple per-location cost doesn't capture their benefits. Once built, rural fiber lines can be used to upgrade cell service or to add more connections to nearby towns...

Some of the differences can be explained by the distinct geographic areas the programs are targeting. While the FCC program included some suburbs and excluded remote locations such as Alaska, the programs run by Commerce and USDA specifically targeted far-flung regions with difficult construction conditions. "These are some of the most challenging locations that there are to reach in America," said Andy Berke, administrator of the USDA's Rural Utilities Service. He cited one project in Alaska that involves a 793-mile undersea fiber cable to reach remote villages.

The U.S. Senate today approved a nominee to fill the vacant, fifth seat on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The Senate voted 55 to 43 to approve Anna Gomez as the fifth FCC Commissioner. Her term will be for five years from July 1, 2021, so effectively about three years. From a report: Gomez most recently has served as a senior advisor on communications policy at the Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy. She was also deputy administrator at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) from 2009 to 2013. The NTIA is not only important as the advisor to the President on national spectrum policy, but the agency is also currently overseeing the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program.

The Federal Communications Commission yesterday rejected requests to eliminate an upcoming requirement that Internet service providers list all of their monthly fees. From a report: Five major trade groups representing US broadband providers petitioned the FCC in January to scrap the requirement before it takes effect. In June, Comcast told the FCC that the listing-every-fee rule "impose[s] significant administrative burdens and unnecessary complexity in complying with the broadband label requirements." The five trade groups kept up the pressure earlier this month in a meeting with FCC officials and in a filing that complained that listing every fee is too hard. The FCC refused to bend, announcing yesterday that the rules will take effect without any major changes.

"Every consumer needs transparent information when making decisions about what Internet service offering makes the most sense for their family or household. No one wants to be hit with charges they didn't ask for or they did not expect," FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said. Yesterday's order "largely affirms the rules... while making some revisions and clarifications such as modifying provider record-keeping requirements when directing consumers to a label on an alternative sales channel and confirming that providers may state 'taxes included' when their price already incorporates taxes," the FCC said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US broadband industry is united in opposition to a requirement that Internet service providers list all of their monthly fees. Five lobby groups representing cable companies, fiber and DSL providers, and mobile operators have repeatedly urged the Federal Communications Commission to eliminate the requirement before new broadband labeling rules take effect. The trade associations petitioned the FCC in January to change the rules and renewed their call last week in a filing and in a meeting with FCC officials. The requirement that ISPs list all their monthly fees "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 groups said in the filing on Friday.

The trade groups said the FCC should instead "require providers to include an explanatory statement that such fees may apply and that they vary by jurisdiction, similar to the Commission's treatment of government-imposed taxes," or require "the display of the maximum level of government-imposed fees that might be passed through, so that consumers would not experience bill shock with respect to such fees." The filing was submitted by NCTA-The Internet & Television Association, which represents Comcast, Charter, Cox, and other cable companies. The NCTA's ex parte filing described a meeting with FCC officials that also included wireless industry trade group CTIA and USTelecom, which represents telcos including AT&T, Verizon, Lumen (formerly CenturyLink), Frontier, and Windstream.

Comcast submitted its own filing urging the FCC to scrap the rules in June. The calls to weaken the FCC's truth-in-billing rules angered consumer advocates, as we wrote at the time. "The label hasn't even reached consumers yet, but Comcast is already trying to create loopholes. This request would allow the big ISPs to continue hiding the true cost of service and frustrating customers with poor service," Joshua Stager, policy director at media advocacy group Free Press, told Ars. Congress required the FCC to implement broadband labels with exact prices for Internet service plans in a 2021 law, but gave the FCC some leeway in how to structure the rules. The FCC adopted specific label rules in November 2022. The labels must be displayed to consumers at the point of sale and include monthly price, additional charges, speeds, data caps, additional charges for data, and other information. The FCC rules aren't in force yet because they are subject to a federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) review under the US Paperwork Reduction Act.