In 2021, Congress mandated "broadband nutrition labels" — standardized disclosures of pricing, fees, and speeds, modeled on FDA food labels. The FCC adopted the rules in November 2022. Unanimously. Full compliance was required by October 2024.
I've spent nearly 20 years in this industry. Here's how it played out.
A 2025 study by Obar and Chen (York University, presented at TPRC) assessed 35 ISPs against ten FCC-mandated criteria — label placement, formatting, machine-readability, required policy links. The average score: 5.2 out of 10. Only sixteen of 35 properly placed labels at the point of sale. Not a single provider received full marks.
On average, compliance tracked size — larger ISPs scored 5.8, medium 5.4, smaller 3.75. But the averages hide the more interesting finding. Three small ISPs scored zero. No compliant label at all. And one of the highest scores in the entire study — 7.5 out of 10 — belonged to Sonic, one of the smallest providers in the sample, tied with Google Fiber.
That's not a size effect. That's a capacity effect. And it's consistent with what the academic literature has been saying for years. Research on SEC disclosure compliance (Ettredge et al., Review of Accounting Studies) found noncompliant firms weren't smaller than compliant ones — they had weaker governance. Work on regulatory cost (Trebbi et al.) documents economies of scale in compliance. A 2026 study of environmental regulation found the same thing: regulatory pressure hits firms as a common constraint, and the differences in outcomes come from internal capabilities — not from the regulation.
The mandate was identical for all 35 providers. What it produced depended entirely on what each organization already was. The rule didn't create compliance capacity. It revealed who had it.
Meanwhile, enforcement never materialized — and at its July 2026 Open Meeting, the FCC scaled the label requirements back, citing compliance burdens.
The label was supposed to fix an information asymmetry between providers and consumers. The asymmetry that actually determined the outcome was inside the firms — between organizations with the capacity to comply and organizations without it.
No. 007 in the Threshold Effects series. First published on LinkedIn, August 10, 2026.