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The Internet

'We Need a Broadband Internet Pricing Equivalent of Nutrition Labels' (slate.com) 94

Posted by BeauHD from the clear-and-easy-to-understand dept.
An anonymous reader shares an article that's part of the Future Agenda, a series from Slate in which experts suggest specific, forward-looking actions the new Biden administration should implement. Here's an excerpt: Consumers in the U.S. face an infuriating lack of transparency when it comes to purchasing broadband services. Bills are convoluted, featuring complex pricing schemes. Roughly 7 in 10 U.S. adults surveyed by Consumer Reports who have used a cable, internet, or phone service provider in the past two years said they experienced unexpected or hidden fees. Unsurprisingly, 96 percent of those who had experienced hidden fees found them annoying. (To the other 4 percent: Are you OK?) We've been here before. In 1990, a similar crisis of consumer confidence prompted one Cabinet secretary to decry that "as consumers shop they encounter confusion and frustration." He said the market had become "a Tower of Babel, and consumers need to be linguists, scientists and mind readers to understand the many labels they see." While this diagnosis could apply almost word-for-word to today's broadband market, then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis W. Sullivan was talking about the grocery store. The solution then offers a ready-made formula for how the incoming Biden administration can help consumers now: add a label.

Before regulatory changes in the late 1980s and early 1990s culminating in the 1994 adoption of the now-iconic Nutrition Facts panel, consumers were faced with a variety of hard-to-understand food labels peddling often-misleading information. While labels were required to list calories, serving sizes, and other nutritional information, including such a label was voluntary except when a company made nutritional claims about a food (such as "low in fat" or "high in vitamins"), or a food contained added nutrients. Without standards for what nutritional claims actually meant, and with no uniform nutrition label with which to compare products, consumers were left to decipher labels that were, according to the nonprofit Institute of Medicine, "at best, confusing and, at worst, deceptive economically and potentially harmful." Today, it's difficult to imagine not having the ability to read straightforward facts about the nutrition content of our food and comparison shop between competing products.

The same could be true for broadband. As far back as 2010, our organization has been advocating for the adoption of a broadband nutrition label. In fact, labeling is such a common-sense measure that it has been adopted in the broadband context before. In 2016, the FCC and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau together rolled out their version of the "broadband nutrition label." "Broadband Facts" resembles Nutrition Facts, emulating a disclosure method the American public is already familiar with. It breaks down a plan's cost and performance, including all additional fees and taxes, so that people don't have to dig through complicated terms of service and contracts to find simple information.
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'We Need a Broadband Internet Pricing Equivalent of Nutrition Labels' More

'We Need a Broadband Internet Pricing Equivalent of Nutrition Labels'

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  • Common carrier. Let's start there

  • I miss the old days of... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RealNeoMorpheus ( 6713808 ) on Thursday December 10, 2020 @11:24PM (#60818298)

    ...Last mile unbundling.

    Its amazing how everyone in our beloved government continues to play stupid and ignore that many dont have a second choice for ISP.

    • It's not "everyone." There is a provision for unbundling in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (it's called line sharing, not unbundling), but it only applies to telecommunication services. When the FCC decided to classify ISPs as information services they killed line sharing, and killed 7000 small ISPs in the process.

      It's not "everyone" in our government playing stupid though, that classification was and is a Republican initiative and subject to much criticism.
  • Are they trying to claim that today's Nutrition Facts panels *aren't* "deceptive economically and potentially harmful"?

    • No, only less so than they were previously.

    • No, I believe they're saying the US economy has reached a point where the idea of free markets and true consumer choices no longer works, because corporations fake about anything and lie about everything in the name of profit. So much that consumers want to be herded and driven towards the good stuff with pretty labels and socialist ideas.

      Perhaps everyone has forgotten how not to buy what they do not want, or perhaps the need for Internet access has become more precious than the need for a free economy or e

  • The problem with internet service in the us isn't labeling. Its straight up shameless lying to the public. Every major isp i've had the misfortune of dealing with engages in deliberate deception about what is being sold. And goes out of their way to to advertise as low of a nominal price as possible while charging as high of a price as possible while promising as fast of service as possible and delivering as little as they can get away with. Truth in advertising and cracking down on bogus below the line

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by fred911 ( 83970 )

      "The problem with internet service in the us isn't labeling".

      Correct. The problem is that Comcast owns 40% of the broadband business in the US (and they're thieves). Correcting their disingenuous marketing practice and erroneous billing "errors" will fix a great majority of this issue.

      • I wish it were that easy. I don't have personal experience with google fiber, but based on how other google stuff has been evolving towards evil since their beginnings I wouldn't be surprised if they were in the same race to the bottom as comcast. I do have personal experience with at&t, verizon, and spectrum and I would describe them in exactly the same way you describe comcast. This isn't an easy problem to fix. The barrier to entry for broadband deployment is extremely high, and there are physica

  • Even simpler... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SvnLyrBrto ( 62138 ) on Thursday December 10, 2020 @11:56PM (#60818364)

    Really, they don't need anything nearly so extensive as a nutrition label. It really needs three things:

    1) The advertised price should BE the price... as in the full price, inclusive of all taxes, surcharges, fees, and any and every thing else. If AT&T wants to break the taxes and such out in a detailed bill to try to get me pissed off at the government instead of them, fine. But if the advertised price says $49.99/month, what is billed to me should be EXACTLY $49.99, no more, no less, no exceptions. (Really, this should be the law for all goods, products, or services of any kind with, again, no exceptions.)

    2) No "up to" speeds without the lower limit advertised right next to it. If there is only one speed on the ad, like 100Mbps or whatnot, that needs to be the absolute lower limit of my service, below which my bandwidth will NEVER drop. If they want to do "up to" advertising of, say, 1Gbps the "up to" must be the burst rate. And there needs to be a "800Mbps guaranteed minimum" right next to it on the ad.

    3) All terms and conditions need to be upfront and in clear and plain (human-readable, not lawyerese) English.

    There are a few other things that need to happen too. Data caps and throttling need to be banned. Any ISP monitoring or shaping of traffic needs to be banned as well... absolute true net neutrality. You're just a dumb pipe. Piss off about how I use it. Severability and arbitration need to be banned (From all contracts actually, not just ISP T&Cs.)... if you try to pull a fast one and slip in an illegal clause, that act of bad faith on your part wipes out any obligation that I have to you. And any changes to the T&Cs need mutual affirmative consent, none of that "If you don't refuse this change in 30-days, your consent is assumed." crap. But none of that is related to the ads themselves.

    • EVERY connection is throttled to some degree by the very nature of the algorithms inherent in TCP/IP

      everywhere has data caps its explained by the speed of your connection or contract, this is normal outside of the USA to put it in the contract.

      nowhere is just a dumb pipe that stopped being the case a long time ago... they monitor the traffic because most of the time they have legal obligations to do some sort of monitoring even if it's for "quality" they measure the flows at the very least.

      John Jones

      • That's simply not true. I've worked in an ISP (telecom) in Europe some years ago.
        Data caps don't exist for landline Internet here - only for mobile. Even for that, once you go over the limit you are not charged more - just your speed is reduced to something like 128kbps until the next month.
        All data is treated equally and the only prioritization that is done is based on the ToS field in the IP packets or something like this. i.e. type of traffic, NOT origin of traffic.
        Traffic is being monitored only for
    • I absolutely agree.
      These things however are symptoms born out of the lack of competition you guys have in the US. The focus should be ensuring healthy competitive market in all places. This type of BS won't fly once you have competing (and I mean really competing, not just fronts) providers.
      Every provider should be allowed access to poles and underground passages for cables OR lease them with equal conditions.
      The closest thing you might have to this is the "municipality networks" that are popping up
    • 1) Can't be done. AT&T provides service in hundreds if not thousands of different local jurisdictions, each with their own unique taxes, mandated surcharges, and fees. Requiring AT&T to provide service at a single advertised price of $49.99 means someone in a jurisdiction where there's $20 of taxes and fees is actually paying $29.99, while someone in a jurisdiction where there's $10 of taxes and fees is paying $39.99 for the same service. i.e. The customers in low-tax jurisdictions end up subsidi

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dfm3 ( 830843 )

        1) Can't be done. AT&T provides service in hundreds if not thousands of different local jurisdictions, each with their own unique taxes, mandated surcharges, and fees.

        sure they can. Just charge one price and let the customers in the less taxed jurisdictions subsidize those in the more heavily taxed regions. They have no problem figuring out which bills to tack those charges to as it is, so any inability to be able to calculate the sum total of fees and taxes they should collect is only a failure of their own bookkeeping.

        In any case, most of those line items are not taxes, but BS like "franchise fees" and "CEO yacht payment surcharge" that the companies add on their ow

      • Re:Your government should already be providing thi (Score:4, Interesting)

        by DaveV1.0 ( 203135 ) on Friday December 11, 2020 @08:44AM (#60818992) Journal

        1) Can't be done. AT&T provides service in hundreds if not thousands of different local jurisdictions, each with their own unique taxes, mandated surcharges, and fees. Requiring AT&T to provide service at a single advertised price of $49.99 means someone in a jurisdiction where there's $20 of taxes and fees is actually paying $29.99, while someone in a jurisdiction where there's $10 of taxes and fees is paying $39.99 for the same service.

        Oh, you mean they will be forced to advertise locally instead of nationally. No big deal there.

        2) A lot of people don't seem to understand how cable Internet service works. You're not getting dedicated bandwidth. If you were, your monthly bill would be about two orders of magnitude higher than it is (a 43 Mbps T3 is about $3000/mo, a 155 Mbps OC3 is about $10k-$15k per month).

        If they are physically incapable of providing the bandwidth they sell, then they are committing fraud. They get around this by using "up to". Basically, you are saying it is OK to sell 100 people in a neighborhood "up to 400 Mbps" and actually be able to provide 400 Mbps to the total group meaning the only way one can get 400Mbps is if everyone else is off line completely. You are literally defending fraud.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by hjf ( 703092 )

          You can whine all you want. But if we go by your definition, we'd all be getting 1mbps.

          If you were correct, someone would have sued them AND won. It's been the norm for over 2 decades. It's stated in the contract (which you didn't read). So stop pretending you're a lawyer. Shared bandwidth is the reason you get gigabit speeds.

          Also, the fact that most people can't be bothered to plug stuff into their router and want only WIFI is another reason you get gigabit: wifi can't do gigabit. They're not lying: you DO

          • Also, the fact that most people can't be bothered to plug stuff into their router and want only WIFI is another reason you get gigabit: wifi can't do gigabit

            802.11ax would like to have a word with you.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by hjf ( 703092 )

              Oh yes the 802.11ax enabled router provided by your ISP. Get real.

              • I see... deflection time... first it's Wifi can't support gigabit, then it's because the ISP doesn't provide it? I think it's you that needs to get real. If a person wants Gig Wifi, it's available and they can buy it.
          • Interestingly enough, that is exactly what is happening. When you have a 1Gbps pipe and 5 people who have been sold "up to 400Mbps", when they all try to use it, they all get less than 400Mbps, they get between 100Mbps and 300Mbps. If you do the same with 100 people, they get between 8 and 10, do it to 1000 and they get around 1Mbps.

            If you were correct, someone would have sued them AND won.

            That is why they word it as "up to 400Mbps". Don't guarantee the 400Mbps. They don't even guarantee 1Mbps.

            It's stated in the contract (which you didn't read).

            See I did read the contract.

            Shared bandwidth is the reason you get gigabit speeds.

            No. It is why we are sold gigabit speed and

            • Shared bandwidth is the reason you get gigabit speeds.

              No. It is why we are sold gigabit speed and only get speeds in the low hundred Mbps range.

              And you'd prefer to be sold 1 Mbps and be guaranteed to always get it?

              FWIW, I have an SLA that guarantees my bandwidth. It's nominally 100 Mbps symmetric, though the contract only guarantees that at any given moment I'll get at least 85% of that -- and says that for every minute the SLA is not met, I get 8 minutes of free service. Is that the kind of contract you'd like to have? If so you can buy it.

              Would you like to guess what my connection costs per month?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by stikves ( 127823 )

          But that is how networking works in general.

          I have a 24 port switch at home. All ports have gigabit connectors, but the fabric is less than 24gbits. It is very unlikely to have all ports at 100% saturation for any meaningful length of time.

          Take CDMA for example. The entire reason we switched from TDMA 2G GSM networks was lack of utilization. If the cell tower has 100 phones connected, it should not divide the time equally, and give everyone a miserable 56kbit line. Most phones stay idle most of the time.

          Sim

      • ban forced hardware rent (if you must use there hardware then that price must be part of the basic price) (and you can use your own then have an added discount for owning your own)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by necro81 ( 917438 )

        2) ... Statistically, everyone's usage patterns average out, and most of the time they won't completely use up that shared bandwidth

        Then, statistically, they ought to be able to make a statement along the lines of "95% of the time*, your bandwidth will be >= X". At the very least, the FCC (or CFPB, or whoever) should be able to enforce the following: you cannot advertise the "Up To" speed unless you can actually achieve that at least some significant percentage of the time.* Even better I would like

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Minimum speeds are a tricky thing to measure, they depend on what server you are measuring from as much as anything. Also they ignore minimum latency and the variability of latency, which is an issue I had many years ago.

      In the UK all ISPs are required to advertise the average speed their users get, measured independently on undisclosed consumer's lines. They are also required to tell you what your line is capable of (DSL often can't reach the maximum theoretical speed).

      That's a reasonable way of doing thin

    • The advertised price should BE the price... as in the full price, inclusive of all taxes, surcharges, fees, and any and every thing else.

      This.

      Do note that this is a general problem in the US. Basically every shop you walk into has fake prices. $2.99 - but actually you pay $3.24 because they neglected to tell you about the sales tax. Or restaurants: Go to a restaurant nearly anywhere else, and the menu price is what you actually pay. Not 20% extra, because the restaurant doesn't pay it's personnel proper wag

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dfm3 ( 830843 )
        The trouble is that over the last 80 years people in the US have become so conditioned to expect pricing to work that way, that they as a whole actually shun retailers who use honesty in pricing or who don't end every number in .99 (plus 9/10 if you buy gas!). Case in point: we had a few restaurants in our area who tried to pay their workers *actual* minimum wage (shocking!!) and then bumped up their menu prices to include the cost of a 15% tip and tax and rounded off to the nearest dollar, and asked custom

    • It's really not that simple.

      2) Guaranteeing a lower limit is very difficult. Consider roads. Can the government or any operator guarantee traffic to flow at a minimum speed? They can set a maximum speed and enforce it, but how to do guarantee a minimum speed? If there's too much traffic, congestion, accidents, closures for repairs, erratic users/drivers...

      3) Agree that terms and conditions for sure need to be in plain text. But I think you have a tension when you say you want guaranteed minimums, but then w

    • It is difficult to know what the price is, or even what you are buying for whatever you are charged. These are called "deals", which appear to be designed to confuse the customer as far as is possible. I have no doubt a "deal" could be devised which complies with all these stringent requirements, but still bamboozles the customer, because of how people are encouraged to interpret the terms of the "deal". You have to bear in mind that the average consumer is up against professionals in the matter of advertis

  • Next you will want hospitals to post prices for procedures and services like any other business.... To be fair. my cable internet provider sends a list in tiny type once a year of all rates. I calculate rental for 4 sets x nonsense and it makes me happy....and sad that people pay that for a low level video experience.

  • Food nutrition labels suck. "Serving size" is too arbitrary. "Nutrient density" is a better metric, or at least some kind of ratio or percentage.

    • Food nutrition labels suck. "Serving size" is too arbitrary. "Nutrient density" is a better metric, or at least some kind of ratio or percentage.

      We Nerds often speak in Analogy. Like Klingon, it's sometimes found to be used excessively, be technically inaccurate, and not all that impressive.

      Unfortunately, our oldest dialect (Car) is becoming more and more difficult to speak accurately. It's not like "Crank it up, mash the clutch, and put it in gear" really applies in our future driverless electric world. That said, we should have probably stuck with it. Food we many know, but nutrition? Pfft. Yeah right.

      • Yeah but no. Really, it's a terrible example of something to strive for, analogical disparities notwithstanding. The nutrition labels are full of lies. Things like, if there is less than 1.0000 per serving, you can say there is 0g. Even if it is 0.9999g. You can literally claim there is no trans-fats, when there is a sizeable percentage of trans-fats, by just adjusting your serving size to whatever you want. And that's just one example. There's hundreds of other straight up lies allowed.
    • You have to love it when a single use package has a serving size of 2.5 servings per package.

    • Well, it's not like advertising is any better. So many fast food places advertise their "meals", when they absolutely are not. You can't provide nutritionally empty fat, sugar, and carbs and call that a "meal". Often the calories, fat, and carbs are so insane that the average person wouldn't be able to eat much else that day to try to make up for the nutrients they missed.

      A lot of fast food offerings clock in closer to dessert than they do to real food.

      And then their actual desserts? Holy shit! Sonic has a

  • In most areas there is no competition for service so what good are labels that help people compare prices? First break up the monopolies, then worry about simplifying pricing info.
  • We need to not get ass-raped for shit-tier internet connectivity. So many other 1st-world countries have faster internet cheaper than the U.S. does. The ISPs here won't even be so kind as to give us a courtesy reach-around for our trouble. They've had quite the free ride for quite a number of years now and it's high time they were reined in.

  • Simpler Than That (Score:4, Informative)

    by ytene ( 4376651 ) on Friday December 11, 2020 @05:01AM (#60818738)
    The broadband market is a con, plain and simple.

    As I have noted in comments against previous articles [slashdot.org], if you went to buy gas for your car and the pump gave you 120 fluid ounces for every gallon that you *thought* you were buying (a gallon is 128 fluid ounces), then that gas station could be prosecuted under the "weights and measures" laws of your state. The same with groceries - if you went to a store and bought a 2lb pack of bacon but it only contained 1lb 12oz, you have a legitimate claim against the retailer, under the law, because they are advertising one thing but actually delivering another. It's like a "breach of contract".

    Telco's get around this by advertising speeds of "up to" and then some fancy quoted number. Their contracts are written to absolve the telco of any obligation to meet the speeds they claim they can deliver. For the icing on the cake, they then include terms in their contracts that make it pretty much impossible for you to sue them for breaks in service or failure-to-perform. That, incidentally, is a textbook example of an unconscionable contract [legalmatch.com], but that would take us off topic.

    There is a solution to this, of course. It's one that the telecommunications industry would absolutely *hate*, but it would also be relatively simple to implement:

    Enact a law that says that whatever price-for-quoted speed the telco advertise, they are required by law to bill customers on a pro-rata basis, based on the average speed delivered across the billing period. In other words, say you're paying $80/month for gigabit ethernet, but on average you're only seeing 500Mb/s across December. Applying this suggested rule, your telco could only charge you $40 for your services in December, because they had failed to meet their contract.

    Now, there's an important distinction we need to make if this starts to sound interesting, which is the difference between line speed and . Say you're paying for a gigabit download speed. You go to your modem's administration panel and check the actual line speed that you're getting over the physical link between your modem and the rack modem at your telco's nearest PoP (Point of Presence). You can see you're getting the full gigabit. You pay $80, right?

    Well, no. That's because, thanks to Ajit Pai, the telco's are now permitted by law to "throttle" your services. In other words, even if you are paying for gigabit and even if the remote server you want to access has the capacity to give you a gigabit connection, your telco could throttle you to, say, a 256Mb maximum rate, just because they can.

    Worse, thanks to Ajit Pai, they can do this without any obligation to notify you. They can do it and then charge you *more* money to unlock the extra bandwidth. This becomes particularly relevant if you want to stream say 4K video content from a provider that is a competitor to services offered by your telco. Thanks to Ajit Pai, your telco now has a legal right to degrade the service you get from the content provider you *want* (say a sports or movie channel) in the hope that you'll get so fed up of the poor picture quality or "hanging" frames that you'll switch to a service they provide...

    Unfortunately, the broadband market is almost perfectly designed for abuse. Let's hope that Biden re-instates the Wheeler-era Net Neutrality provisions *and* tightens up the law on charging.

  • You need consumer protection laws and a consumer advocacy ombudsman to royally screw companies who engage in even slightly misleading behaviour. You could learn a lot form countries like Australia where any asterisk attached to the word "Unlimited" results in multi-million dollar fines, as are prices listed as a result of bundling, or not advertising straight up that there's a hidden fee.

  • what grings my gears about ISPs (Score:3)

    by FudRucker ( 866063 ) on Friday December 11, 2020 @07:50AM (#60818922)
    is they advertise a certain speed, sure if you just load up a webpage or a music video on youtube it will run that fast, but try to download a 3 or 4 gig Linux ISO and after a few minutes into the download you notice the speed starts to drop off and the download slows down, what they done is they make sure web pages load fast or a small youtube video downloads plenty fast without buffering, but try to actually use the bandwidth to get some content (Linux ISO) and nope, they choked the line for actual content, bandwidth speed is just window dressing
  • Enforce the truth in advertising laws and these problems mostly go away. Well, except that fine print and asterisks in advertisements should be illegal.

  • The telecom companies are basically criminals perpetrating constant fraud with their deceptive practices. They simply need to be much more tightly regulated, with teeth, like other oligopolies.

    Incidentally, that's the final equilibrium state of breaking up AT&T in the 80s: losing what was good in a high integrity monopoly, such as quality research, ending up with a consolidated oligopoly of criminal rent-collectors.

  • Don't do a thing (Score:3)

    by erp_consultant ( 2614861 ) on Friday December 11, 2020 @10:36AM (#60819382)

    Let these monopolistic dinosaurs fail. Broadband companies are just one example of the many that charge too much and provide lousy service. The government won't do a thing about it, at least not anything useful.

    This is right out of the Elon Musk playbook - find an industry that is poorly run and provides shitty service and come up with a better way. He has done this with banking (PayPal), automobiles (Tesla), solar (Solar City) and most recently with broadband (Starlink). With Starlink he is simply going to leapfrog the physical cable internet providers. I suspect he will learn the lessons that Comcast and others have failed to learn, with regard to pricing and customer service. By the time these dinosaurs figure it out it will be too late.

    With Starlink he is about to do something that has never been done before in the US - democratization of internet services regardless of location. Despite years of government promises to get the internet providers to toe the line and own up to their promises to build out rural internet, customers living there are left with embarrassing slow options.

    Yes, Starlink is still in the early stages but many people have started posting videos on YouTube showing real world results and it is light years ahead of what they had previously. In some cases, the cost is even lower than what they were paying and the service quality is far better.

    So long Comcast I hardly knew ya!

    • Unfortunately you are 100% wrong here.

      Starlink will never be able to handle any significant population density. It's not designed to. It will never have the bandwidth to compete in even a small city.

      If you're out in the country where the bandwidth is low, Starlink might work out great for you. If you're in a city, you'd better hope you luck out and are one of the tiny percent of the people who will be able to use it.

      Here's some light reading on the subject [arstechnica.com].

      • Musk has stated that Starlink is not designed for densely packed urban areas. If you live in such a place then Starlink is not for you. But if you do live in a big city then chances are that you already have at least one choice for broadband internet. For people in rural areas their choices are often limited to legacy satellite internet (expensive, very slow, data caps, unreliable) or DSL (very slow, unreliable).

        So Starlink is clearly not for everyone.

        For people in big cities, 5G might be the better alterna

  • the FCC needs to force all the internet providers to at least use a rational datacap.. WHICH IS NOT 1 TB WHEN EVERYONE"S STREAMING!!!! the minimum datacap should be like 3 TB. If you go over that pay overage. Normally I wouldn't want the Govt involved in that, because of the govt there is no competition for broadband, so they need to step in. Truthfully if the FCC had a sack, they would just get rid of datacaps all together. That will never happen.

  • Although more people are probably familiar with nutrition labels, as they've been around for decades, there are other regulations that are even more similar to what's being proposed.

    Such as the documents that banks are required to give prospective borrowers for mortgages under the Truth in Lending Act: https://www.consumerfinance.go... [consumerfinance.gov]

  • Internet contains nuts.

  • pay attention to your router/modem health -- im getting above advertised speeds after updating firmware, disabling guest sharing, resetting hardware, etc.

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