The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: tom wheeler
Net Neutrality Regulations Released By FCC; Industry Lawsuit Expected

Net Neutrality Regulations Released By FCC; Industry Lawsuit Expected

By Jim Puzzanghera, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday publicly released the details of its new net neutrality regulations, which now will be pored over by broadband Internet service providers as they prepare for an expected legal challenge to the rules.

The 400-page order enacting the regulations was posted on the FCC’s website two weeks after it was approved on a partisan 3-2 vote by the Democratic-controlled commission.

The rules, crafted by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, change the legal classification of wired and wireless broadband, treating it as a more highly regulated telecommunications service in an attempt to ensure that providers don’t discriminate against any legal content flowing through their networks to consumers.

The decision to reclassify broadband under Title 2 of the telecommunications law, which has applied to conventional telephone service, was controversial even though Wheeler promised a light, modernized approach.

The FCC’s action was strongly opposed by AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc., and other broadband providers as well as most Republicans.

AT&T hinted at a likely legal challenge of the regulations Thursday.

“Unfortunately, the order released today begins a period of uncertainty that will damage broadband investment in the United States,” said Jim Cicconi, the company’s senior executive vice president of external and legislative affairs.

“Ultimately, though, we are confident the issue will be resolved by bipartisan action by Congress or a future FCC, or by the courts,” he said.

Matt Wood, policy director of Free Press, a digital rights group that strongly supported tough net neutrality rules, said release of the order would end “fear-mongering” by opponents of the FCC’s action.

“Now that Congress and everyone else can read the rules, we can continue to have a debate about protecting free speech on the Internet,” he said.

“But we can dismiss the ridiculous claims from the phone and cable companies and their fear-mongering mouthpieces,” he said. “This is not a government takeover of the Internet or an onerous utility-style regulation.”

The actual new regulations take up just eight pages in the FCC’s order.

The main provisions prohibit broadband providers from blocking or slowing delivery of any lawful content for any reason other than “reasonable network management” and ban so-called paid prioritization, which would involve offering websites faster delivery of their content to consumers for a price.

The FCC could waive the ban on paid prioritization if a broadband provider or company could demonstrate it “would provide some significant public interest benefit and would not harm the open nature of the Internet.”

Most of the order was an explanation of the new regulations and the reasons for enacting them in hopes of withstanding a court challenge. Two previous FCC attempts to enact net neutrality rules were largely overturned by federal judges.

The last 87 pages of the order are statements from the five commissioners, including a 64-page dissent from Republican Commissioner Ajit Pai.

Pai and the agency’s other Republican commissioner, Michael O’Rielly, as well as key GOP members of Congress, unsuccessfully pushed Wheeler to release the entire proposal before the Feb. 26 vote.

But Wheeler did not, noting it was longstanding agency practice not to release draft proposals until they were approved by the commission.

In the two weeks since the vote, agency lawyers have been preparing the final version of the order.

It now will be published in the Federal Register in the next few weeks. Most of the rules will go into effect 60 days after that publication.

Photo: Federal Communications Commission staffers listen to statements being read during the FCC vote on net neutrality on Thursday, Feb. 26, 2015, in Washington, D.C. (Brian Cahn/Zuma Press/TNS)

Open Internet Survives Weird Politics

Open Internet Survives Weird Politics

Net neutrality won the day in Washington, and that wasn’t supposed to happen. Republicans indignantly opposed regulating Internet service, currently dominated by a few cable giants. Texas Republican Ted Cruz called it “Obamacare for the Internet” (in his world, fightin’ words).

The lobbying money and muscle of Comcast, AT&T, and Time Warner no doubt stoked the lawmakers’ passions. And when the Federal Communications Commission voted to prevent Internet service providers from establishing fast lanes for favored customers, its two Republican members voted against it.

So why, when the FCC said the Internet would be treated as a public utility, like telephone lines, did Republicans retreat rather than battle on? The most cited reason was the successful campaign by open-Internet activists working alongside heavy broadband users, notably Netflix, Twitter and Mozilla, proprietor of the Firefox browser.

But there’s another reason. A lot of ordinary Americans hate their cable company. They fume with every month’s astronomically high TV-Internet-phone bundle bill, the product of the company’s monopoly or near-monopoly power.

High-speed Internet is seen no longer as a luxury but as the staff of commercial and personal life. Many Americans know that they are paying vastly more for far slower service than their friends in France, in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe. For huge numbers of us, hating the cable company transcends politics.

Faced with these realities, the ideologically motivated voices on the right do what they do so well, avoid them. You have Holman Jenkins in The Wall Street Journal writing that the big tech names — Google, Facebook, Microsoft — didn’t fight against the net neutrality decision “because they didn’t want to be attacked by left-wing groups.”

(Yeah, Google, Facebook and Microsoft are so shy about defending their interests.)

In the real world, these big content providers have been for — not against — net neutrality. In a letter last spring to the FCC, they warned that permitting the Internet service providers to slow traffic for some sites and speed it for others would pose “a grave threat to the Internet.” Did they make themselves clear?

As for the politics, Barbara van Schewick, an Internet expert at Stanford Law School, offers a wildly different analysis of why Google and the others didn’t rush into the fray. She told Wired they “risked drawing the ire of the Republicans in Congress who might retaliate in various ways.”

Elsewhere in the real world, the cable companies don’t seem devastated by the FCC decision. The stocks of Comcast and Time Warner Cable actually rose in its wake. Their proposed merger was being held up by fears of creating a monolith that couldn’t be regulated. Now there are regulations, lowering those fears and making the merger likelier.

Meanwhile, Wall Street analysts have dismissed Republican claims that net neutrality will throttle the cable companies’ investment in infrastructure. After all, the service providers paid $44 billion to buy a new wireless spectrum at a recent FCC auction.

“They wrote that check full knowing that this was coming,” Daniel Ernst, an analyst at Hudson Square Research, said on CNBC.

Google is pro-net neutrality, though it did have some reservations about regulating the Internet like a phone company. That’s because Google’s business interests have spread into broadband. But note that the head of Google Fiber said the impending FCC decision “did not have any specific impact on (Google’s) plans to build more Fiber cities.”

All this solves the mystery of why Republican lawmakers did not bark after the FCC rejected their position. What’s left for the pure ideologues is a bowl of kibbles about the evils of regulation and the selfless good deeds of corporations. That bowl never empties.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

Photo: Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler makes a statement during the FCC vote on net neutrality on Thursday, Feb. 26, 2015, in Washington, D.C. (Brian Cahn/Zuma Press/TNS)

FCC Tightens Internet Oversight With New Net Neutrality Rules

FCC Tightens Internet Oversight With New Net Neutrality Rules

By Jim Puzzanghera, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

WASHINGTON — Federal regulators dramatically expanded government oversight of the Internet, installing the once-arcane concept of net neutrality as a guiding doctrine for broadband networks that have become essential to everyday life.

To ensure the uninhibited flow of data online, the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 along party lines Thursday to reclassify broadband providers as more highly regulated utilities.

The increasingly shrill debate in the last year over network neutrality — the idea that all legal content be treated equally online — has raised more profound issues of free speech, privacy, innovation, capitalism and the role of government in the 21st century.

“The Internet is the most powerful and pervasive platform on the planet. It’s simply too important to be left without rules and without a referee on the field,” said FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, the architect of the agency’s plan.

The new rules prohibit such companies as AT&T Inc., Time Warner Cable Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. from slowing Internet speeds for some content such as video streams, selling faster lanes for delivering other data or otherwise discriminating against any legal online material.

Wheeler promised a modernized, light-touch regulatory approach that would exempt broadband service from many of the tougher provisions, particularly rate regulation, permitted by its new designation.

The partisan divide in the Democratic-controlled FCC reflected strong opposition from telecom companies and conservatives worried about government interference with a system that appears to be working well for all sides so far.

“Americans love the free and open Internet. We relish our freedom to speak, to post, to rally, to learn, to listen, to watch, and to connect online,” said Ajit Pai, one of the FCC’s two Republicans. “So it is sad … to witness the FCC’s unprecedented attempt to replace that freedom with government control.”

Telecom firms criticized the vote as an unwarranted government intrusion that could scare away investors and slow network expansion. They’ve promised to challenge the regulations in court, which could take at least three years to decide. The rules will go into effect 60 days after they are published in the coming weeks.

“The FCC has taken us in a distressing direction,” said Michael Powell, president of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association trade group, who called for Congress to overrule the FCC with more restrained net neutrality regulations.

“We must now look to other branches of government for a more balanced resolution,” he said.

While telecom executives and Republican politicians blasted Wheeler’s plan, it was cheered by Internet firms, public-interest advocates, and Democrats.

Wheeler and the FCC’s other two Democratic members — Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel — received a standing ovation at the start of the meeting by much of a capacity crowd filled with activists who had worked years to enact strong net neutrality regulations.

Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak, who was in the packed audience at FCC headquarters, suggested that net neutrality embodies the concerns about a consolidating broadband industry that leaves many customers with little choice in carriers.

Wozniak said it takes him seven hours to download a movie on iTunes because he has no broadband access at his home in the wealthy Silicon Valley town of Los Gatos. That, he said, showed the power of broadband network owners.

“Water is essential. Electricity is essential,” Wozniak said in an interview. “These days broadband has become essential.”

Veena Sud, a TV producer, told the FCC that the Internet was key to finishing her series, The Killing, which began in 2011 but was canceled after two seasons. Netflix helped provide financing for a third season on AMC and then aired the show’s final season online.

“We told some of our best stories, our toughest, most heartbreaking ones, in those last two seasons of the show — stories that never would have been on the air had it not been for the open Internet,” said Sud, a member of the Writers Guild of America, West.

Hollywood’s creative ranks — the WGA, producers and entrepreneurs who built Amazon.com, Netflix and thousands of YouTube video channels — have lobbied for the increased freedom to create and distribute content without a media company go-between.

Net neutrality regulations would prohibit broadband providers from favoring its own content over those of competitors, such as charging fees for faster delivery that could squeeze out smaller competitors.

But broadband providers and opponents of Wheeler’s oversight said there has been no attempt to create so-called toll lanes on the Internet. They said the FCC is going too far in increasing regulation to address a problem that doesn’t exist.

“We have never argued there should be no regulation in this area, simply that there should be smart regulation,” said Jim Cicconi, AT&T’s senior executive vice president for external and legislative affairs.

“What doesn’t make sense, and has never made sense, is to take a regulatory framework developed for Ma Bell in the 1930s and make her great-grandchildren, with technologies and options undreamed of 80 years ago, live under it,” he said.

Verizon highlighted its view that the FCC was taking an outdated approach by handing out copies of a statement that was typed on a 1930s-era typewriter that said “it is likely that history will judge today’s actions as misguided.”

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) called the new net neutrality regulations “a secret plan to put the federal government in control of the Internet.” He and other Republicans criticized Wheeler for not publicly releasing the 317-page proposal before the vote.

Wheeler countered that the new rules were “no more a plan to regulate the Internet than the First Amendment is a plan to regulate free speech.”

He said he was optimistic that the plan would stand up to legal challenges even though federal judges tossed out two earlier FCC attempts to enact net neutrality rules.

The FCC said it chose to take the controversial step of reclassifying broadband providers for utility-like regulation — reversing a 2002 agency decision — because the move stood the best chance of withstanding a legal challenge to the net neutrality rules themselves.
___
Times staff writers Meg James and Yvonne Villarreal in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

Photo: ALA Washington Office via Flickr

FCC Chief Cites Wireless Industry As Precedent In Net Neutrality Proposal

FCC Chief Cites Wireless Industry As Precedent In Net Neutrality Proposal

By Jim Puzzanghera, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

WASHINGTON — The first Internet browser had just been launched, people were experimenting with a new form of letter-writing called email and the cellular telephone was evolving from a bulky luxury to a mass-market convenience.

The communications landscape was shifting rapidly in 1993 when Congress made a little-noticed change that classified mobile voice calling as a utility yet freed it from onerous utility regulation — part of an initiative to spur competition in the young wireless industry.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler now cites that move as a key precedent for the controversial net neutrality proposal that the agency is expected to approve Thursday.

His plan would impose federal oversight of online traffic to ensure that Internet providers don’t give preference to video and other content from some websites over others. But he promised that the FCC wouldn’t use the new authority to regulate rates or take other steps that would hinder investment in expanding fiber and wireless networks.

Instead, the FCC would use the same light-touch approach that came after the 1993 legislation and that “went hand-in-hand with massive investment” in wireless networks, said Wheeler, a Democrat who was a top industry lobbyist at the time.

“Under that, for the last 20 years, the wireless industry has been monumentally successful,” Wheeler said in a speech last month in Las Vegas.

The early history of wireless regulation offers a playbook for how the FCC could expand its oversight to broadband without disrupting the Internet economy, said supporters of tough net neutrality rules.

“We have 20 years of experience with wireless that tells us that (that type of) regulation does not prevent investment,” said Harold Feld, senior vice president at Public Knowledge, a digital rights group. “We went from having virtually no wireless coverage in this country … to something that everybody had everywhere.”

Critics of Wheeler’s plan said he’s proposing something much different than what Congress and the FCC did in 1993 — and opening the door to potentially onerous regulations.

“Wall Street analysts, economists and certainly folks in the industry … are very concerned about where this will lead,” said former FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell, a Republican and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. “They don’t trust the FCC to stop where it says it’s going to stop.”

For two decades, however, the FCC has shown restraint.

Cellphones were gaining popularity in 1993 — subscribers had tripled to about 16 million over the previous three years — but service and offerings still were limited, and the industry was subject to a patchwork of state regulations. Congress and the Clinton administration sought to boost coverage, improve competition and spur innovation by making more wireless airwaves available and auctioning them to allow new players.

As part of a budget bill, lawmakers created the first auctions, as well as clarified regulations that covered the wireless industry, including barring state and local governments from setting rates.

And most significantly, for net neutrality supporters, Congress told the FCC to oversee mobile voice calling under the section of the telecommunications law — Title 2 — that covered conventional, highly regulated telephone companies. The new measure limited the provisions of Title 2 that applied to the wireless industry.

In 1994, the FCC exempted wireless voice calling from some of the most onerous parts of those provisions, particularly rate regulation. And the following year, the agency rejected petitions from seven states to continue regulating rates under exemptions allowed by the law.

“The rules that we adopted for wireless were new and different,” said Reed Hundt, who was FCC chairman at the time. “By saying that the government was out of the price-regulation business, we opened the door to the market innovation that you experience today.”

Cumulative investments by wireless companies in their networks and services jumped from $14 billion at the end of 1993 to $146 billion a decade later, according to data from CTIA-The Wireless Association trade group.

Growth during that period was driven primarily by voice calling. The popularity of smartphones, with demand for Internet access, sent total cumulative spending to nearly $400 billion by the end of 2013.

Wheeler’s plan would put wired and wireless broadband providers under Title 2 to give the FCC maximum authority to enforce new net neutrality rules. But just as in the mid-1990s, he said, the agency wouldn’t use most of the powers under the provision so it could avoid stunting the industry’s growth.

“We will forgo sections of Title 2 that pose a meaningful threat to network investment,” Wheeler said during a Feb. 9 speech in Boulder, Colo. “That means no rate regulation. … No tariffs or new taxes.”

But some wireless industry officials said equating regulation of wireless voice calling and mobile broadband is like comparing apples and oranges.

“That framework, while it might have worked for voice, doesn’t capture the more dynamic and multifaceted aspects of the mobile broadband marketplace,” said Scott Bergmann, CTIA’s vice president for regulatory affairs.

In addition, Wheeler plans on subjecting Internet providers to additional provisions of Title 2 that were not part of the 1993 action, he said. That could lead the FCC to take tougher steps — including regulating rates — in the future, particularly if pressured by public interest groups, he said.

The FCC faces an additional problem with wireless broadband: The 1993 law specifically exempted services other than mobile voice calling — which later included wireless Internet access — from Title 2 regulation, Bergmann said.

That distinction helped mobile broadband flourish in recent years outside of even light-touch FCC regulation, according to critics of Wheeler’s plan.

“There is no question, if you look at the investment patterns, especially since the introduction of smartphones in 2007 and thereafter, that mobile broadband investment is what is driving tremendous benefits that wireless consumers have been seeing in recent years,” said FCC member Ajit Pai, a Republican and outspoken opponent of Wheeler’s proposal.

Meredith Attwell Baker, CTIA’s president, said last month that the wireless industry “will have no choice but to look to the courts” if the FCC changes the regulatory designation for mobile broadband.

FCC officials said Wheeler, in arguing that the agency can subject mobile broadband to tougher Title 2 oversight, noted that Congress gave the FCC the authority to update regulatory definitions to reflect marketplace changes.

The wireless experience, they said, shows that an update to categorize a service as a utility does not have to lead to heavy-handed government regulation.

Photo: ALA Washington Office via Flickr