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

The Federal Communications Commission will vote to eliminate a rule that requires Internet service providers to list all of their so-called “passthrough” fees on an easily accessible broadband price label. The FCC vote could also make the price labels themselves a bit harder for consumers to find.

ISPs routinely advertise prices much lower than those actually charged to consumers on their monthly bills. One method of raising monthly bill prices above advertised rates is to tack on fees that, ISPs claim, are used to offset charges imposed by local governments.

ISPs would be well within their rights to advertise accurate monthly prices and charge those exact prices on monthly bills. But because ISPs rarely do that, the FCC has required them to make specific price disclosures to consumers for the past decade.

The Biden-era FCC updated the broadband-label rules to require that ISPs “itemize on the label all discretionary monthly fees that the provider passes through to the consumer.” The change drew protest from Comcast and other ISPs that complained bitterly about the complexity of listing all the hidden fees they had chosen to charge.

Under Chairman Brendan Carr, the Trump FCC has steadily whittled away at requirements imposed under Democrats. An order released in draft form last week would eliminate the requirement to itemize passthrough fees and let ISPs list them in a single “up to” amount. The “up to” amount can include both government fees and fees charged by non-government entities such as owners of utility poles.

“Rather than continuing to require providers to itemize ‘passthrough fees’ that can vary by location, we allow providers to display such fees in the aggregate, either as a maximum or ‘up to’ amount for the total fees applicable in any location where the service plan is offered, or as the exact total of such fees assessed in a particular location,” the FCC draft order said.

Making price info less accessible

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.

Junk fees, hidden charges

A planned change mentioned earlier in this article will likely result in fewer consumers seeing the price labels at all. Instead of displaying the full label at the point of sale and in each customer’s account portal, ISPs will be allowed to use hyperlinks to direct potential buyers and current customers to the labels displaying the full price information.

“While using hyperlinks to broadband labels instead of displaying the labels automatically may result in fewer consumers reading the label, interested consumers still have the opportunity to view the broadband label,” the FCC said.

It may become more difficult for third parties to collect price data because the FCC intends to eliminate the requirement that ISPs provide the price-label contents separately in machine-readable spreadsheet files on their websites. ISPs will still have to make the information accessible to people with disabilities by making the labels compatible with screen readers and other assistive technologies.

Public interest groups urged the FCC to scrap the planned changes during the comment period. The changes will make “the problem of junk fees, hidden charges, and difficult-to-understand billing worse, which could result in the widening of the digital divide. The Commission must not weaken oversight by allowing ISPs to operate without transparency, evade accountability, and entrench abusive practices,” a January 2026 filing said.

The filing was submitted by Public Knowledge, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, the Open Technology Institute at New America, the National Consumer Law Center, the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. The groups said that scrapping the fee-itemization rule “would strip consumers of critical pricing transparency and invite providers to mask charges they choose to pass along to consumers. Allowing providers to forgo itemization is similar to permitting hospitals to send bills to patients with no explanation of charges, medication, or facility fees.”

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.”

ISPs get what they asked for

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.”