Internet Plans Now Come With ‘Nutrition Labels.’ No One Knows How to Read Them.

Internet-service providers have been required since earlier in 2024 to list standardized price and speed data on labels that look like the nutrition-facts panels on packaged foods, allowing consumers to compare plans. But broadband users often don’t know to look for them. Or can’t find them. Or, when they do manage to track down the labels, they see misleading or unhelpful information about their internet speeds or pricing. The Federal Communications Commission mandated the labels but hasn’t taken steps that could make them more useful to consumers, such as standardizing how companies display the labels, said consumer advocates and industry watchdogs. “We’ve always thought of the labels as an iterative process,” the FCC said in a statement, adding that the current labels are “a starting point” and it is mounting a consumer-awareness campaign for them. Consumers know they can flip over a box of cookies to find out the number of calories or grams of fat in a serving. The logic of labels for broadband is similar: Let users know what is in their internet packages. The broadband labels list monthly pricing—including whether that is a promotional, introductory rate—along with a breakout of installation and other fees, “typical” upload and download speeds, and how much data is included in the monthly price. Understanding them is a separate matter. Consumers might not grasp the meaning of “latency”—the term for the time it takes for data to be transmitted when, for example, a user presses a button on a joystick. The data also isn’t put in context, and consumer advocates say it isn’t necessarily helpful to show download speeds without explaining what they mean.