How Serious Is the FCC About Net Neutrality and Broadband Buildout?

All you need to know about the Federal Communications Commission's ability to address Net Neutrality and the buildout of broadband services to rural and other underserved users is this: industry providers such as AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association prefer operating under the FCC's current vague and hazy powers, and are outraged at proposals to give the FCC more robust legal authority.

University of Michigan law professor Susan Crawford summed up the arguments for the FCC to take broadband seriously by regulating it as a telecommunications "common carrier" in a terrific NY Times Op-Ed last month:

(The FCC) can regain its authority to pursue both network neutrality and widespread access to broadband by formally relabeling Internet access services as “telecommunications services,” rather than “information services,” as they are called now. All the commission needs to do is prove it has a good reason.

It wouldn’t be the first time that the F.C.C. relabeled Internet access services — and certainly not the first time it addressed the need for equal access. Until August 2005, the commission required that companies providing high-speed access to the Internet over telephone lines not discriminate among Web sites. This allowed innumerable online businesses — eBay, Google, Amazon, your local knitter — to start up without asking permission from phone and cable companies. There was nothing unusual about this legal requirement; for more than 100 years, federal regulators had treated telegraph and telephone service providers as "common carriers," obligated to serve everyone equally.

The Washington Post reports that FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is leaning towards maintaining the status quo.

The companies that are most affected by the debate are the network operators such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast which provide the transportation of Web traffic on their networks. They would be cheered by a decision from the FCC to retain its current regulatory structure that is a murkier statute and would make it more difficult for the agency to impose rules on them. And they warn that reclassification of broadband would hurt their businesses.

"It should come as no surprise . . . that leading financial analysts and technology commentators have questioned this path," the biggest telecommunications and cable trade groups wrote in a letter to Genachowski last week. "Thus it is hard to imagine a regulatory policy more at odds with the commission's goal of encouraging 'private investment and market-driven innovation.' "

But net neutrality supporters -- companies such as Google and Skype and public interest groups -- have called for the agency to shift broadband Internet services more clearly under the agency's authority, saying consumers would be more vulnerable to business decisions that could cut off competition and access to applications on the Web.

In a letter to Genachowski last Friday, University of Michigan law professor and former Obama economic adviser Susan Crawford and other communications law professors outlined a legal argument to reclassify broadband. They disagreed with carriers who say the move wouldn't stand legal challenge.

"The FCC now faces a choice, It can abandon the idea of supporting high-speed Internet access . . . and requiring providers of high-speed access to disclose information about their costs and speeds," she wrote with Columbia University professor Tim Wu and University of Nebraska professor Marvin Ammori.

The telecommunications industry is spending millions on lobbying against these changes, making many of the same arguments against increased federal oversight over the structure of their businesses as were made by the health insurance lobby last year. Wall Street's favorite telecom stock guru, Scott Cleland, is getting high blood pressure over the prospect:

Premature characterizations that this nouvelle regulatory "deeming" would somehow be easy, clean, or containable, simply have not thought through the potential chaos, havoc, and uncertainty that such a radical, foundational, and over-reaching regulatory "deeming" would wreak on:

• Legal/policy precedent, clarity, and stability;
• Business investment, and innovation -- assumptions, incentives, models and practices;
• Economic growth, private investment and job creation;
• Industry financial stability, contracts, and debt covenants; and
• Trust, cooperation, and respect the FCC needs to fulfill its mission and its National Broadband Plan.

This is an important decision that will probably get far less attention than this week's American Idol loser.

- Barry Orton

Comments

[John Foust]

The fight against net neutrality is heating up, and guess who is behind it.

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/05/11/netneutrality-grover-afp/