Members of FCC’s Open Internet Advisory Committee Question Role They Were Assigned by Agency

"There are no FCC resources going into the support of this committee,” Clark said. “I don’t know what the commission wants from us. The commission itself is in a state of transition. We don’t know what the new chairman is going to want. ... If we're doing work that is primarily public facing it’s not clear to me that having the imprimatur of the FCC helps. Many good research results occur without having the imprimatur of the FCC on them.” Those projects are easier to fund, he said. “Then I can do them as an MIT employee as opposed to doing them as a special employee of the FCC."

"I worry that we're being asked to do work because we exist and we're thoughtful individuals ... but not work with a purpose beyond that,” said Marcus Weldon, chief technology officer of Alcatel-Lucent. The FCC needs to provide the committee with direction on the work it has done so far “before we go any further, otherwise I fear we just exist because we exist,” Weldon said.

Charles Kalmanek, vice president-research at AT&T, agreed the FCC needs to provide more direction. “Certainly I understand as a researcher the desire to anticipate surprises, but as an engineer I like to work on things that are based on facts,” he said. The work of the committee should not be based “on opinion, speculation or hypotheticals” but on “real activities that are occurring in the marketplace,” he said. “What monitoring is desired?” Kalmanek asked. So far there are “precious few harms that have been identified in a year’s worth of work,” he said.

Harvard Professor Jonathan Zittrain, chairman of the committee, said the FCC did assign the group a few jobs -- monitoring the state of the Internet and a special two-year review of the evolution of mobile broadband. It may be time for the committee to meet with acting FCC Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn, Zittrain suggested. Tom Wheeler has been nominated by President Barack Obama to replace Clyburn as chairman.

Tejas Narechania, FCC designated federal officer assigned to the committee, told members they can be a kind of early warning system as problems develop. Members of the committee “are a lot closer, I think, to emerging trends than sometimes we can be at the FCC,” he said. “That sort of early warning system, really getting a sense of what’s coming and how things are changing, is extremely useful.”

"Where the [committee’s] work can often be most useful is in distilling, clarifying and condensing diverse viewpoints into something that at least uses common technology,” said FCC Chief Technology Officer Henning Schulzrinne. “We worry about ... what are the kind of surprises that can occur,” he said. The committee can help the FCC keep track of changes that could “shake up the ecosystem,” Schulzrinne said. “Can we use your collective expertise to help us not be too surprised? I think that’s particularly important for a commission right now in its transition phase with new leadership and another new leadership in the wings.” Given the FCC’s budget issues, it is unlikely the FCC will have any money available to perform research on issues examined by the committee, he said.

Even in filling a monitoring role, a lack of resources dedicated to the committee is a problem, Zittrain conceded. “Who is literally going to be filling out the spreadsheets that monitoring may ultimately boil down to and where will the sources of the data that’s being monitored come from?” he asked.

Shane Greenstein, member of the committee and professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, said it’s a problem that neither Apple nor Google have a representative on the committee. “I would say it’s actually rather difficult to have a conversation about the future of the Internet without either of those two firms in the room,” he said. “I would go even more forward and say, Amazon and Facebook, at least at the moment ... and arguably eBay and Yahoo” also aren’t part of the committee.

Before the committee held its lengthy discussion, it received updates from its four working groups, which are preparing reports to be submitted to the FCC. The working groups discussed most of its findings at the committee’s last meeting (CD May 8 p3) and posted an update online (http://bit.ly/150PBoA).

The working group on the economic impacts of open Internet frameworks has spent the last year looking at data caps, said Northwestern’s Greenstein, chairman of the group. “Generally most of the caps we've observed in the United States don’t yet impact users other than the highest users,” he said. “We can only reach tentative conclusions that the situation may change in the future as many of the conditions change -- like user habits, supplier experimentation, vendor policy and applications.”

The specialized services working group has written a six-page report defining what is meant by special services and recommending ways of monitoring these services, Clark said. The definition is more complicated than immediately apparent and the FCC has used alternative definitions over the years, he said. “In general terms, specialized services is that term to describe things that can be offered over the facilities of a facilities provider, a telephone or cable company, which are distinct from the Internet service” and don’t fall under the net neutrality order, Clark said. “But the question is where is that line drawn and precisely how is that definition written,” he said. “We don’t propose a specific definition. We point out that the FCC should probably attend to this because it could conceivably lead to some confusion going forward."

Russell Housley, founder of Vigil Security, said his transparency working group is recommending to the FCC that it promote a voluntary labeling program that covers both mobile and fixed services. “A simple and consistent label will enable consumers to make apples to apples comparisons when considering an Internet service selection or when considering a change,” Housley said. “The proposed label would cover performance, price and usage restrictions.” ISPs would self-report upload speed, download speed and monthly price, based on the average price over 36 months including all taxes and fees, he said. “These numbers are very far from a complete picture of an Internet service offering, yet they seem to be the right level of detail for most consumers.”