Under federal law, internet service is not telecommunications. Broadband is classified as an “information service” under Title I of the Communications Act, a separate category from the “telecommunications service” label that applies to phone lines. The FCC briefly reclassified broadband as telecommunications in 2024, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit struck that order down on January 2, 2025, putting broadband back where it had been for most of the past two decades. So when people ask whether telecommunications includes the internet, the current legal answer is no.
The Statutory Line Between the Two
Two definitions in 47 U.S.C. § 153 do the work here.1Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 47 USC 153 – Definitions
“Telecommunications” means transmitting information between points the user picks, without changing what’s sent along the way. A phone call is the classic example. Your voice leaves your handset, travels across the carrier’s network, and arrives on the other end unaltered. A “telecommunications service” is offering that transmission to the public for a fee, and providers of such services are treated as common carriers, meaning they must serve everyone on equal terms.
“Information service” is defined differently. It’s the capability to generate, acquire, store, transform, process, retrieve, or make information available through telecommunications.2Legal Information Institute. 47 USC 153(24) – Definition of Information Service Internet access does more than shuttle raw data from point to point. It gives you access to stored content, lets you interact with servers, and processes what you send and receive. That extra functionality is the reason the FCC and the courts have repeatedly landed on the information-service side of the line for broadband.
Why the Label Matters
The Communications Act is organized into titles. Title I covers information services and gives the FCC limited, general oversight. Title II covers telecommunications services and imposes common-carrier obligations: pricing transparency, non-discrimination, mandatory contributions to federal programs, and a much heavier penalty structure. A Title II violation can carry a forfeiture of up to $251,322 per instance, or roughly $2.5 million for a single continuing violation.3Federal Register. Annual Adjustment of Civil Monetary Penalties To Reflect Inflation Title I gives the agency nothing close to that.
Ownership rules shift with the classification too. Common-carrier licensees cannot have more than 20% direct foreign ownership, and their parent companies face a 25% ceiling if the FCC finds heavier ownership contrary to the public interest.4Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 47 USC 310 – License Ownership Restrictions Those caps do not apply to information-service providers. When broadband moves between titles, the rules on who can invest in your ISP move with it.
How Broadband Got to Its Current Classification
The classification of broadband has swung with nearly every change in FCC leadership.
In the early 2000s, the FCC treated cable broadband as an information service, and the Supreme Court upheld that call in 2005. In 2015, the FCC reclassified broadband under Title II and adopted net neutrality rules barring blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization. In 2017, the FCC reversed course, returned broadband to Title I, and repealed those rules.
The most recent swing came in April 2024, when the FCC adopted the Safeguarding and Securing the Open Internet Order. That order moved broadband back to Title II and reinstated the net neutrality bright-line rules against blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization.5Federal Register. Safeguarding and Securing the Open Internet; Restoring Internet Freedom The FCC also reasserted authority over broadband for national security and public safety purposes.6FCC. FCC Restores Net Neutrality – Press Release
It didn’t hold. On January 2, 2025, the Sixth Circuit unanimously struck down the order, finding the FCC lacked statutory authority to impose common-carrier regulation on broadband providers. The court set the entire order aside, and broadband reverted to its Title I information-service classification.
What This Means Today
As of 2026, broadband internet access is a Title I information service. Your ISP is not a common carrier. The FCC does not enforce net neutrality rules against internet providers, and there are no federal bright-line prohibitions on blocking, throttling, or paid prioritization of traffic. The current FCC under Chairman Brendan Carr has moved in the deregulatory direction, eliminating or proposing to eliminate over 1,100 rules across multiple sectors during 2025.7Federal Communications Commission. Chairman Carr Highlights Wins Delivered in 2025
The FCC retains general Title I authority over broadband and can pursue some consumer-protection actions, but the toolkit is far smaller than what Title II would provide.
Privacy
Title II carriers must protect Customer Proprietary Network Information — data about your communications activity. When broadband sat under Title II, those rules reached ISPs. The FCC also adopted broadband-specific privacy rules in 2016 that would have required consent before providers shared browsing and app usage data, but Congress repealed those rules in 2017 under the Congressional Review Act and barred the FCC from adopting “substantially similar” rules in the future.8Federal Register. Protecting the Privacy of Customers of Broadband and Other Telecommunications Services With broadband back under Title I and no replacement rules on the books, there is no comprehensive federal privacy framework aimed at internet providers. The FTC can pursue ISPs for deceptive or unfair practices under general consumer-protection authority, and some states have their own broadband privacy laws.
The FCC’s 2024 data-breach notification rules require telecommunications carriers to notify federal agencies within seven business days of discovering a breach and affected customers within 30 days.9Federal Register. 10Federal Communications Commission. Contribution Factor and Quarterly Filings – Universal Service Fund Management Support You see this on phone and interconnected VoIP bills. You don’t see it on a standalone broadband bill, because the FCC has never required ISPs to contribute — even during the Title II periods, the agency used its forbearance authority to exempt them.
Internet access also enjoys a permanent federal tax shield. The Internet Tax Freedom Act, made permanent in 2015, bars state and local governments from imposing taxes specifically on internet access.
One Big Exception: Interconnected VoIP
Voice service delivered over the internet sits in an unusual spot, and it’s worth knowing about because it looks like an internet service but is regulated more like a phone service.
The FCC has not given VoIP a clean Title I or Title II label. Instead, the agency applies specific telecom-style obligations to “interconnected” VoIP providers, meaning services that let you place and receive calls to and from the traditional phone network. Interconnected VoIP providers must contribute to the Universal Service Fund11eCFR. 47 CFR Part 54 – Universal Service and provide Enhanced 911 service, transmitting the caller’s registered address and routing information to the appropriate emergency center.12eCFR. 47 CFR Part 9 Subpart D – Interconnected Voice over Internet Protocol Services
“Non-interconnected” VoIP — app-to-app voice services that never touch the public phone network — falls outside those obligations. Federal law defines it as a real-time voice service using internet protocol that doesn’t connect to the public switched telephone network.13Legal Information Institute. 47 USC 153(36) – Definition of Non-Interconnected VoIP Service
So the boundary is narrower than it looks. Federal telecommunications law reaches phone service and the VoIP services that talk to the phone network. It does not currently reach the broadband connection that carries them.