President Joe Biden is challenging business as usual for the broadband industry, attacking murky pricing, high fees, and landlords restricting tenants’ choice of internet service providers. reports Bloomberg.
Steps outlined in a Biden executive order Friday reprise Obama administration policies that industry and Republicans have resisted or ignored, prefiguring a fight to come at the Federal Communications Commission and underscoring how hard it may be to deliver on many of Biden’s roster of changes.
A major cable group Friday called Biden’s statements “misleading,” and a group representing largest phone companies AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. said “context and facts are largely missing” from the White House’s release outlining its broadband policies.
“All the recommendations involve policies advocated by leadership in the Obama administration but were either reversed by the Trump FCC or were not implemented,” Blair Levin, an analyst for New Street Research, said in a note Friday. Furthermore, he said, none of Biden’s recommendations can be adopted until there is a Democratic majority at the FCC -- an agency that’s currently without a permanent leader or even a nominee.
Biden also asked the agency to revive the “Broadband Nutrition Label” that offers details of promised price and performance of internet service. The FCC and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau jointly unveiled a voluntary label in 2016.
The label has been little used, and was abandoned by the administration of Republican President Donald Trump, according to New America’s Open Technology Institute. It said labels could help shed light on “hidden fees, surprise bills, and dense contracts.”
Biden also called for restoring so-called net neutrality rules passed by Democrats during the Obama administration. The rules bar internet service providers from interfering with subscribers’ web traffic, for instance by favoring content from business partners over other services. They were gutted by a Republican FCC during the Trump administration, a development backed by the broadband industry.
The idea that providers would keep consumers from internet content is a “tired and disproven assertion,” said NCTA - The Internet & Television Association, a trade group with members including largest U.S. cable provider Comcast Corp. and No. 2 Charter Communications Inc.
The administration’s policy statements read as if “exhumed from some time capsule in an alternate universe,” said Jonathan Spalter, chief executive officer of the trade group USTelecom, with members including AT&T and Verizon.
“The whiff of rate regulation referenced in the White House fact sheet is also concerning,” Spalter said in a statement. “Washington shouldn’t be setting broadband prices in a competitive market with lots of consumer choice. Government regulating prices in one of the country’s most dynamic industries is chilling and counterproductive to our shared goal of connecting everyone, everywhere.”
Levin, in his note, said Biden’s recommendations wouldn’t bring about price regulation or government-subsidized construction of competing networks.
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