Former FCC Chief Technologist Raises Concerns on Broadband Labels FNPRM
Eliminating some of the requirements that the FCC has proposed to slash in its broadband labels further NPRM is ill-conceived, said Jon Peha, a former FCC chief technologist and professor at Carnegie Mellon University, in comments last week in docket 22-2 (see 2512290038). A consumer can’t “make an informed decision about whether to keep … current service or switch to another service unless the customer can see the label associated with that current service,” Peha said. The FCC should “require ISPs to display the label in the online account portal, and to clarify that the label should be updated when the customer’s plan changes.”
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Clear labels benefit consumers, Peha said. “Consumers are often confronted with a choice”: When a provider offers a new service at a “special” price, “is that new service better or worse for that particular customer than the customer’s current service?” They need to be able to see the whole label of the current service and of the new service “in order to make line-by-line comparisons,” he said.
But Indiana ISP Joink argued that the FCC is right to slash some mandates. “Requirements such as reading labels over the phone, displaying labels within customer account portals, maintaining archived labels for two years, and publishing data in machine-readable format impose significant administrative and technical costs that do not materially improve consumer understanding.”