FCC to end Biden-era rule that forces ISPs to list all their fees

The order to be voted on later this month includes a few other changes that will please ISPs and their lobby groups. ISPs will be allowed to provide links to price labels instead of displaying the full labels prominently on ordering pages and account portals, and will be allowed to stop making the price-label information available in machine-readable spreadsheets. The FCC is also relaxing the requirement that price information be available over the phone. The FCC said the change will “allow phone sales representatives to present label information conversationally, as a summary of key label fields, rather than require verbatim recitation.” The changes have been in the works since October 2025, when the FCC issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to let the public submit comments on the proposals. The outcome of that process is the draft order, which will be voted on at the FCC’s July 22 meeting and take effect 30 days after it is published in the Federal Register. There are many types of passthrough fees that ISPs will be able to stop listing individually and roll into the “up to” amount. The FCC defined the fees as follows, saying they include just about anything that isn’t a tax: For purposes of this Report and Order, “passthrough fees” are monthly charges that 1) are imposed by a government entity or third-party infrastructure owner rather than set by the provider itself; 2) represent costs the provider chooses to pass through to consumers rather than rolling them into the base monthly price; and 3) vary by consumer location. For example, “passthrough fees” include state and local right-of-way fees, pole attachment fees imposed by third-party pole owners, and similar charges. “Passthrough fees” do not include taxes. If ISPs wanted to make things simpler for consumers, they could treat these non-tax expenses as the cost of doing business and incorporate them into their advertised monthly prices. The prices consumers ultimately pay might not change if advertised prices were accurate, but it would be easier for regular people to figure out what they’ll pay when they sign up for service. The groups urged the FCC to preserve machine-readable price information, saying it “clearly benefits consumers by aiding in the development of comparison shopping tools and aggregate market research.” The groups also said that “telephone-based disclosures remain essential to informed consumer decision-making” because they “serve as an important safeguard against scams and misleading offers that may reach consumers via mailers, e-mail, text messages, fake/scam websites, or robocalls.” Another planned change will eliminate a requirement that providers archive all labels for at least two years after a service plan is no longer available. The Utility Reform Network, an advocacy group, told the FCC that the archived labels provide crucial data about how prices and services change over time, and that machine-readable labels are important for affordability research and information accessibility. The Utility Reform Network also said that itemization of passthrough fees helps prevent bill shock. Displaying an “up to” price instead “would only serve to dilute the effectiveness of the label and increase consumer confusion around how the final price they pay is calculated,” the group said. Cable and telecom lobby groups submitted comments supporting the FCC plan to eliminate or relax various requirements. “The Commission correctly highlights the complexity and burdens providers have had to undertake to display all ‘charges that providers impose at their discretion, i.e., charges not mandated by a government’—including the passthrough of government-imposed fees,” USTelecom said. “To comply with this government-imposed fees requirement, providers must create and update hundreds of different labels to account for geographic variability and to ensure that their systems properly queue the label specific to the proper location when the customer inputs their address.” USTelecom said that requiring machine-readable information is only helpful for “third-party researchers who are not the intended beneficiaries of the label” and “has no clear purpose or benefit except for third parties seeking to mine this information.” Urging the FCC to stop requiring the listing of all fees, cable lobby group NCTA said it is burdensome “to create and maintain labels for each and every combination of government passthrough fees.” The NCTA complained that this rule and others “are unnecessary or unhelpful in informing consumers about the services that providers offer and impose an outsized compliance burden on providers.”