The Federal Communications Commission votes July 22 to gut a 2024 rule that forced internet providers to itemize every “passthrough fee” tacked onto their advertised prices. Under Chairman Brendan Carr, the agency’s draft order lets ISPs collapse pole-attachment charges, right-of-way fees, and other add-ons into a single “up to” figure on the broadband label instead of listing each one.
The itemization mandate traces to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which ordered the FCC to build a nutrition-style label so consumers could comparison-shop broadband the way they compare cereal boxes. Comcast and other carriers complained, calling the location-by-location fee breakdowns too burdensome to maintain. The rollback traces back to an October 2025 rulemaking notice that teed up exactly this outcome.
This is Carr’s FCC running the same playbook it’s applied to net neutrality and digital discrimination rules: label a Biden-era consumer protection a compliance burden, then hollow it out instead of repealing it outright. The label survives. What’s inside it doesn’t. ISPs can also hyperlink to labels instead of displaying them at checkout, drop the machine-readable spreadsheets researchers rely on, and stop archiving retired labels after two years.
Public Knowledge and five other advocacy groups warned in January that the change works like a hospital billing patients with no line-item breakdown of charges or fees. The FCC’s answer was that interested consumers can still click through to the full label.
The order takes effect 30 days after publication in the Federal Register.
James Okafor