March 2015

[Commentary] Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler said it best at last week’s historic FCC meeting: “The Internet is simply too important to allow broadband providers to be the ones making the rules.” Amen. All the fog-it and smog-it rhetoric of the big Internet Service Providers since Feb 26’s vote cannot cloud the core issue. The question at the heart of this vote was simply whether the public agency charged since the 1920s with protecting consumers, competition, and innovation in telecommunications still retains these vital responsibilities in the advanced telecommunications world of the twenty-first century. Will there be some place to turn when a few too-powerful Internet gatekeepers try to short-circuit the most dynamic communications tool in all of history? When they block, throttle, or degrade online sites they might not like? Or limit our ability to get the news and information we need in order to maintain our democracy? Are we to stand helplessly by as Verizon, Comcast, and AT&T favor their friends with express lanes on the Internet autobahn while consigning the rest of us to the bumpy dirt roads of yesterday’s technology?

As a general rule, the Federal Communications Commission is in the driver’s seat when it comes to spectrum management in the US. But that doesn’t mean that Congress can’t, and won’t, occasionally engage in some aggressive backseat driving. And so it is that several members of Congress have reintroduced legislation -- S.424 in the Senate, H.R.821 in the House -- strongly suggesting the direction the FCC should take with respect to the 5.9 GHz band (i.e., 5860-5925 MHz).

The bills would require the FCC to “provide additional unlicensed spectrum in the [5.9 GHz band] under technical rules suitable for the widespread commercial development of unlicensed operations in the band”, provided that the Commission first determines that such use won’t cause harmful interference to existing licensees of that band. The bills also provide detailed specifications, and an accelerated timetable, governing how the FCC must make that determination.

The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission moved to deregulate prices for Verizon's landline phone service in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and three other regions -- a decision that could lead to sizable price jumps for customers, who pay about $22 a month for traditional local phone service. By a 3-2 vote that drew sharp dissents from the commission's two Democratic appointees, the PUC partly backed Verizon's October petition, which asked that its service be declared "competitive" in the five markets under a 2004 state law that sought to promote phone and Internet competition. The commission declined to deregulate 41 of the 194 wire centers Verizon sought to reclassify, largely in suburban areas such as Ardmore, Chester, Jenkintown, and Langhorne, where testimony showed that at least 3 percent of households lacked access to cable companies' phone service as an alternative. PUC Chairman Robert F. Powelson called the decision "an important step towards modernizing how we regulate telecommunications in Pennsylvania."

The tough regulations for network neutrality are a wild card when it comes to the $45 billion merger of the nation’s two biggest cable companies, industry observers say. On the one hand, some analysts argue that the new Federal Communications Commission regulations will eliminate many of the harms that might come from combining Comcast and Time Warner Cable, giving regulators reason to approve the deal. But if the new rules are a symptom of a larger trend at the FCC of cracking down on big companies, it could spell trouble going forward. “I think we’ve seen an FCC that has been much firmer with the broadband industry than a lot of people expected a year ago,” John Bergmayer, a senior staff attorney at Public Knowledge, said. “It shows that you have an FCC and a chairman at the FCC who is really not afraid to take on established industry [and] do what he thinks is right.”