Last year the Biden FCC implemented a new rule requiring that broadband providers include a “nutrition label for broadband,” making any fees, restrictions, usage caps, or other limits clear at the point of sale. The proposal was mandated by Congress as part of the bipartisan infrastructure law.

But four years after Congress proposed the idea, a new study indicates that many ISPs aren’t doing a great job adhering to the rules. The Trump FCC has also announced that it's taking formal steps to weaken or eliminate the rules as part of the agency’s broad, frontal assault on consumer protections.

The new academic study (first reported on by Broadband Breakfast) by York University researchers Jonathan A. Obar and Boxi Chen gave 35 different U.S. ISPs a ten-star based grade on how well they are adhering to the FCC broadband label requirements, including label placement, standardized formatting, machine-readable data files, and required policy links.

The results weren’t pretty: only sixteen ISPs properly placed labels at the point of sale as required, and not a single ISP received full marks for completely adhering to the FCC’s requirements. Only six ISPs received a full ten star ranking for proper formatting.

After decades of redlining and broadband “digital discrimination” by the nation’s biggest telecom monopolies, the FCC finally began taking aim at the problem in 2023. Now the entirety of those efforts are poised to be dismantled, courtesy of the Trump administration’s broad, controversial frontal assault on discrimination reforms and civil rights.

The 2021 infrastructure bill set aside $42.5 billion to expand broadband into all unserved parts of the United States.

But it also tasked the FCC with crafting new rules taking aim at “digital discrimination.” On November 15th of 2023 the agency obliged, passing rules banning ISPs from broadband discrimination based on income, race, or religion.

Civil rights and digital equity activists were split on the potential impact of the rules, but they did agree on one thing: it was historic for federal policymakers to finally admit that telecom monopoly deployments had unfairly excluded many low income and minority neighborhoods from affordable, next-generation broadband access.