May 2011

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski will argue at a House hearing May 5 that antitrust laws alone cannot do the job of protecting the open Internet.

He will testify before the House Judiciary Competition subcommittee. Subcommittee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) has proposed tweaking antitrust laws to preserve the open Internet, rather than enforcing FCC rules. Chairman Genachowski will essentially oppose that strategy on Thursday. He will say he does not think that antitrust laws alone could preserve an open Internet or provide the regulatory certainty he says was another aim of the rules. He also argues against adopting new antitrust laws on Internet openness, saying that would be a "problematic approach, ill-suited to the fast-changing nature of Internet technology." He agrees with the Supreme Court that, "while statutes are hard to change in light of new developments in network technology or markets, expert administrative agencies have flexible processes for dealing with the unexpected and are, accordingly, better suited for handling this particular issue."

Attorney General Eric Holder briefly touched on several tech-related topics during an oversight hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

When asked by Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) for his view on intellectual property enforcement, AG Holder called piracy and copyright enforcement "a very, very substantial problem." AG Holder also called himself a "satisfied owner of both an iPod, iPad and an iPhone" but said the Justice Department will wait for the committee's hearing on mobile applications that store consumers' location data without their consent before determining whether to take action against the firms involved, which include Apple and Google. Finally, AG Holder said the Department of Justice is more than willing to collaborate with the Committee as it prepares to overhaul the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

Rep Maxine Waters (D-CA) took aim at the Federal Communications Commission's network neutrality rules in a speech to a Computer and Communications Industry Association meeting in Washington.

An early supporter of the net-neutrality rule initiative, she was less sanguine on the resulting compromise rules. The FCC's new network-neutrality rules are insufficient and could harm consumers, she told the group, opining about the resulting rules arrived under "the immense pressure exerted on the FCC from industry stakeholders and some Members of Congress." The rules, approved in December but which will not go into effect for several more months, were the product of negotiations with industry stakeholders and a stand-down from initial proposals by the chairman to classify Internet access under some Title II common carrier regulations. Among the compromises was applying only some of the regulations -- transparency and non-blocking -- to wireless broadband. The FCC said there are legitimate network management and architecture differences that justified the disparate treatment, but Rep Waters was, and is, not convinced.

[Commentary] AT&T|T-Mobile merger critics argue that reducing the number of broadband service providers could allow the remaining service providers to increase the cost of monthly subscription fees. The merger partners dispute this point. But this "cost" critique ignores a crucial question: what do broadband consumers believe is of value in the wireless environment? The simple answer is "content" (that list includes such thing as music, movies, and games). Many Broadband customers will likely spend larger amounts of money on this content than on their monthly service plans. Yet critics of the merger ignore this essential point and focus instead on "price, price, and price."

To the Songwriters Guild of America, the key question is: what value do consumers stand to gain, and what do they stand to lose, from this combination? Our conclusion is, because of the content-protection values advanced by the acquiring party -- AT&T -- and because of the economic importance that consumers place on music and other content when utilizing wireless and broadband services, consumers stand to gain significant content value by the merger. Given that potential price increases resulting from the merger are far from proven, the significant enhanced value that consumers should experience from properly protected content places this merger solidly in the public interest.