Broadband Labels Give States Tool to Use Against Some ISPs, Colorado's Weiser Says
Broadband nutrition labels, proposed by the FCC last month, would help the states to ensure consumers get the connections they’re paying for, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser told FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel during a Silicon Flatirons webinar Thursday. Weiser, a former White House telecom official, interviewed Rosenworcel at the start of the program.
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The FCC wants broadband labels to be as clear and easy to read as nutrition labels on food at the grocery store (see 2201270030), Rosenworcel said. “When you buy broadband it should be that simple too,” she said: “There’s a lot of fine print. … It’s not easy to read. It’s not easy to parse.” The goal remains to make the labels mandatory in November, she said.
“When companies make that commitment, if they violate it, I can enforce the Consumer Protection Act, which says you can’t deceive consumers,” Weiser said. “It’s a great enabler” for his office, he said: “Companies are going to have to think long and hard about what they say they’re doing.”
The No. 1 complaint Colorado consumers had in the past was robocalls, but that changed due to the Traced Act, Weiser said. “Robocalls are not relatively as bad as they were -- they’re still terrible,” he said.
Robocalls remain “incredibly annoying” and are “destroying trust in our networks,” Rosenworcel. “We have to figure out every single resource that we have to stop them,” she said. By working together, the FCC and the states are “far more likely to find … bad actors and hold them to account,” she said. There are 51 state AGs including Washington, D.C., she said. “I would like there to be a world where every single one of them agrees to share information,” she said. The FCC announced new robocalling enforcement agreements with Colorado and Vermont Thursday, bringing the total of state-federal partnerships to 16.
The view in Washington has changed on the importance of broadband, Rosenworcel said: “It has become apparent to all of us it’s now an essential service, and we need it in every household, everywhere.” She likened the administration’s approach on broadband to rural electrification in the early 20th century. “When I think of the $65 billion that’s in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, I see exactly the same thing happening,” she said. “We’re going to map where service is and is not, and we’re going to try to fill in every single gap,” she said.
The TV incentive auction was “probably the most creative spectrum auction we ever came up with” and the 600 MHz spectrum sold fueled “the 4G revolution,” Rosenworcel said. “We had really over-allocated for TV stations; in other words we had more spectrum than we had television stations that were viable,” she said.
Rosenworcel, who worked on the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act as a Senate staffer, said it may be time for revisions. “It’s amazing what that law did, and it’s amazing in 2022 that I look at that law and I think it needs an update,” she said. “That’s how fast technology is changing, and it’s really a challenge for people who draft legislation, write policy” to develop rules that “stand the test of time,” she said.
Wilkinson Barker’s Jennifer Tatel, former FCC acting general counsel, found most interesting Rosenworcel’s comments about the need for the FCC to be creative and think about issues “in a new and different” way, she said. “It sort of permeated all the different areas that she touched on,” Tatel said. “We’re faced still, or again, with looking for new and creative ways to facilitate spectrum sharing and spectrum clearing,” she said.
“The mountain of work facing the chairwoman and the FCC is enormous because the needs are not dwindling, they’re rising,” said Ernesto Falcon, Electronic Frontier Foundation senior legislative counsel. Falcon wants continuing emphasis on making more unlicensed spectrum available for small players. “Otherwise, we’re completely dependent on licensees who are essentially the largest players who have the most money to be able to participate in these auctions in the first place,” he said.
Gus Hurwitz, University of Nebraska professor of law, joked that the 2-2 FCC has been “wonderfully boring” and all the excitement has been a result of the C-band and the FAA (see 2201180065). A boring FCC is “good for all of us,” he said: “It’s good for policy.” Much of the FCC’s work “gets into the nitty-gritty technical stuff that doesn’t make headlines, but is really incredibly important,” he said.