Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Guirong Hao)

Biden administration officials are not convinced by the broadband industry's claims that Internet prices aren't too high, according to a report today by Axios .

The White House announced on March 31 that President Biden "is committed to working with Congress to find a solution to reduce Internet prices for all Americans." Though Biden hasn't revealed exactly how he intends to reduce prices, the announcement set off a flurry of lobbying by trade groups representing ISPs to convince Biden and the public that Americans are not paying too much for Internet access. ISPs even claim that prices have dropped, despite government data showing that the price Americans pay has risen four times faster than inflation.

A Biden official told Axios that the ISPs have not made a convincing case. "A senior administration official told Axios the bulk of the evidence shows prices have gone up recently and prices are higher than they are for comparable plans in Europe," Axios wrote. "Biden noted the high cost of Internet service in March, and the official told Axios, 'I don't think we've seen anything since he made those comments to make us feel like we were wrong about that. We're still committed to taking some bold action to make sure that we bring those prices down for folks.'"

Enlarge / A trio of Wi-Fi 6 Eero Pro devices like these should provide excellent Wi-Fi coverage and performance for nearly any home. (credit: Eero )

This Tuesday, Eero—one of the first and most popular Wi-Fi-mesh providers—announced a new hardware and software program which targets ISPs rather than retail customers. Ars spoke about the new program at length with Nick Weaver, Eero founder and CEO, and Mark Sieglock, Eero's GM of Software Services.

The short version of Eero for Service Providers is simple: deploy new Eero 6 series hardware, let your customers self-install using a co-branded app with the ISP's own name on it, and provide the ISP with Eero Insight, a dashboard allowing them to view metrics from the entire fleet-level down to individual households. The telemetry exposed to the ISP includes outages, speed-test data, client network topology, RF diagnostics, and more.

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  ISPs using Eero Insight can check for network outages using Eero telemetry, with configurable alert levels. [credit: Eero ]

Weaver told us that the vanilla Eero Insight dashboard itself wasn't the whole story, though. The metrics, charts, and graphs the dashboard exposes can also be accessed via API, allowing larger providers to seamlessly integrate the data into their own, existing dashboards.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Yuichiro Chino )

The broadband industry is suing Maine to stop a Web-browsing privacy law similar to the one killed by Congress and President Donald Trump in 2017 . Industry groups claim the state law violates First Amendment protections on free speech and the Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution.

The Maine law was signed by Democratic Gov. Janet Mills in June 2019 and is scheduled to take effect on July 1, 2020. It requires ISPs to get customers' opt-in consent before using or sharing sensitive data. As Mills' announcement in June said, the state law "prohibits a provider of broadband Internet access service from using, disclosing, selling, or permitting access to customer personal information unless the customer expressly consents to that use, disclosure, sale or access. The legislation also prohibits a provider from refusing to serve a customer, charging a customer a penalty or offering a customer a discount if the customer does or does not consent to the use, disclosure, sale or access of their personal information."

Customer data protected by this law includes Web-browsing history, application-usage history, precise geolocation data, the content of customers' communications, IP addresses, device identifiers, financial and health information, and personal details used for billing.