Broadband Prices May be Too High, Martin and Adelstein Say
Broadband prices may be too high, two FCC members said at the start late Monday of a commission hearing in Pittsburgh on the technology. “The cost of broadband is still too high for some consumers,” said Chairman Kevin Martin, citing Free Press research. Still, he said, the commission has made “significant progress” removing barriers to broadband and other telecom competition. The FCC must “promote and preserve” the Internet’s “open character,” Martin said, noting that the agency has before it a complaint against Comcast involving BitTorrent (CD July 16 p2).
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
Martin bemoaned rising cable rates, as he had previously, and said the commission is studying cable programming “tying arrangements.” In the deals, programmers may link pay-TV carriage of cable networks to allowing the distributors to carry broadcasters’ signals. “That might constrain the small cable operators and their ability to provide broadband,” Martin said. “We're concerned about making sure independent programmers are able to contribute to the marketplace of ideas.”
Despite progress in rolling out broadband, Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein said, more must be done “to meet the major infrastructure challenge of our time” through increased deployment. A recent study found that 35 percent of dial-up Web users haven’t switched to broadband because it costs too much, he said. “Other Americans, especially those in rural areas, report that they still lack access to broadband,” Adelstein added. “The U.S. faces deficits of adoption, affordability and capability” compared with other places, he said. The Internet must “remain open” because “consumers don’t want the Internet to become another version of old media, dominated by a handful of companies,” he said.
“Technology tools” of this century are a “civil right,” FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said. Regardless of location or income, “you will need -- and you are entitled -- to have these tools and services available to you,” he said. Commissioner Deborah Tate called broadband “the key driver for growth of many of the sectors in the purview of the FCC.” The U.S. has “the largest broadband network in the world,” with over 100 million lines, she added. Online piracy and child porn must be fought, she said, touting last week’s agreement between the cable industry and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Commissioner Robert McDowell said the availability of online video and other content have created a “powerful and market-driven a la carte environment.”
The FCC should shift the Universal Service Fund toward broadband, Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Pa., said in opening remarks. “Our nation has made a significant commitment to providing universal telephone service, especially to those in rural communities,” he said. “The time has come for Universal Service 2.0, which addresses the challenges that people in both urban and rural areas face in getting connected to the high-speed Internet.”
Internet providers shouldn’t be allowed to filter copyrighted content, Doyle said. Filters could block mash-ups and other remixed versions of copyrighted music protected under a “well-established carve-out in the law called ‘fair use,'” he said. Mash-up artists “could end up being the fair-use dolphins caught in the tuna net of digital privacy,” he said.
The American Civil Liberties Union opposes copyright filters, it said. The commission “should not resort to unconstitutional license conditions such as mandatory and automatic filtering -- the Internet should remain a zone free of any gatekeepers or censors,” Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington office, said in comments pre-filed for the hearing. The FCC should study “the growing practice” by ISPs of tracking their customers’ Internet habits using deep-packet inspections, she said. “Under the guise of applying differential pricing based on the speed, volume, application preferences, or even the substance of content, service providers could snoop on every facet of user activity.”
This fall AT&T will clarify and improve customer disclosure policies, Robert Quinn, federal regulatory senior vice president, said in remarks prepared for the FCC broadband hearing in Pittsburgh. Late last year, the carrier began a “broad examination” of its policies, he said. The new policy stresses the customer’s right to free expression, “clear” information about service capabilities and “meaningful limitations” and discrete, disclosed broadband speed tiers, he said. AT&T bars illegal activity by subscribers, but “has not and will not suspend, disconnect or terminate service because of the views our customers express on any subject,” he said.
AT&T will tell customers it “regularly monitors the technical performance of its network” and works to “minimize the impact of security threats” such as viruses, worms, spyware and spam, he said. The carrier will tell customers of any network limits it uses to manage traffic and update users on any changes, he said. AT&T will explain the gap between speeds a customer gets and AT&T’s potential speeds, he said. “With any shared network, some limitations on the uses individual subscribers make of their service are inherently necessary to ensure that all customers collectively receive an acceptable level of service,” he said. On AT&T’s network, 5 percent of wireline broadband customers account for about 40 percent of traffic, and 1 percent account for about 20 percent, he said.