The FCC has cut seven requirements out of the broadband label, and the instruction carrying every change a shopper would notice has no effective date

Anyone shopping for home internet next month will see the same label as today.

The Federal Communications Commission filed a final rule for public inspection on Wednesday that removes or loosens seven requirements attached to the broadband consumer label, the standard box carriers must show at the point of sale. The order, FCC 26-48, was adopted on 22 July and released the next day. The changes to the label itself have no start date.

Read the DATES line. The rule takes effect thirty days after publication "except for instruction 3 (§ 8.1(a)), which is delayed indefinitely," and the Commission says it will publish a separate document announcing when that instruction begins. Instruction 3 is where every label facing change sits.

The seven

Phone sales staff will no longer have to read the label out word for word. They must instead summarise aloud the monthly price including monthly fees, the introductory rate and how long it lasts, typical download and upload speeds, latency, the data allowance, the contract term and any early termination fee. The Commission declined to write a script for that summary, and declined to take telephone sales out of the definition of point of sale at all.

Fees are the substantive change. Rather than itemising every passthrough fee, which the rule now defines as a monthly charge imposed by a government body or a third party infrastructure owner, recovered separately from the base price, and varying by the customer's location, a provider will be able to show one aggregate figure, either the exact total for a jurisdiction or a maximum across the whole service territory. A provider choosing the maximum must break it into government imposed costs and non-governmental third party costs, name the types of fee in each, and point to a webpage describing them. The figure must not understate what any subscriber pays, and must be revised upward if fees rise. The Commission refused a proposal to let providers rest on a rolling twelve month historical average.

Then five more. The Affordable Connectivity Program line comes off the label, since the programme has ended. A hyperlink or an icon may stand in for the full label at the point of sale, and the same is allowed inside a customer's account portal. The requirement to publish label content as a machine readable spreadsheet at a dedicated address is deleted. So is the requirement to archive a label for two years after the plan stops being sold to new customers. The implementation deadlines of April and October 2024 come out as spent.

What survives

Two duties survive intact. Labels must still be accessible to people with disabilities, and must still appear in every language a provider markets in. On the machine readable file, the Commission writes that the accessibility duty is independent of the provision being deleted, and that the deleted rule "was not adopted to advance accessibility." Commenters had asked it to keep American Sign Language, Braille and tactile formats open as questions, and it closed that inquiry along with proposals on bundles, discounts, interactive labels, additional languages and a style guide.

It also declined to exempt mass market services sold to business customers, and declined a request from one provider to exempt services bought through the E-Rate and Rural Health Care programmes.

The order is non-major under the Congressional Review Act, a view the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs concurred in, and a copy goes to Congress and the Government Accountability Office.