FCC Has to Get Past Net Neutrality Debate, Speakers Say at FSF Conference
The time has come for the FCC to put the net neutrality debate behind it and get on with other issues, such as the retirement of the plain old telephone system, panelists said Thursday at a Free State Foundation lunch on looming changes at the FCC. Congress needs to update the Telecom Act of 1996 and develop “a new policy framework” for the IP era, said House Communications Subcommittee Vice Chairman Bob Latta, R-Ohio, speaking at the session.
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.
James Speta, professor of law at Northwestern University, predicted industry will get little clarity when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit hands down a decision on the net neutrality challenge. A three-judge panel heard oral argument in the case Sept. 10. “I've written several times that the FCC just doesn’t have this kind of authority” to issue the rules on the grounds cited in the net neutrality order, Speta said. “That’s not what I predict will happen,” he said. Instead there will be “a continued muddle.” The court will say the order “was a little too much either on a substantive ground or on an explanation ground and it will go back” to the FCC for further work, he said.
The net neutrality case is “incredibly important for communications law students and incredibly irrelevant for consumers,” said James Assey, executive vice president at NCTA. The cable industry is “building an open Internet, believes in an open Internet and the day after the case comes out we are still going to have an open Internet,” he said.
AT&T Senior Vice President Bob Quinn said he agreed the case is “much ado about nothing” and of little concern to consumers. AT&T supported the rules when they were approved three years ago “so that we could stop talking about net neutrality and Title II because it was actually putting kind of this overhang on the investment community and everything that we did had this huge overhang to it,” Quinn said. As a result of the rules, AT&T “didn’t have to change a single business practice,” he said. “My great fear is at the end of this we're going to have a huge disruption again and we're going to have this whole conversation about Title II and everything else and it’s going to suck all of the air out of the room."
The FCC has a much more important issue before it -- the IP transition, Quinn said. “I live in a world where I can’t turn off POTS until the FCC actually says it’s OK to turn off POTS,” he said. “I can’t stop investing in the TDM world until then and if we spend the next two years or three years talking about net neutrality again, we're never going to get to those issues.” Quinn warned that if the D.C. court overturns all or part of the net neutrality order “we are going to get caught in a swirl, really quickly, about the application of Title II to Internet services.” If the government appeals the decision to the Supreme Court, that would buy time for Tom Wheeler, nominee for chairman, to work on other issues, while the appeal continues, Quinn said. “At least he would have a clean runway,” Quinn said of Wheeler. “He does have a short time frame, getting shorter all the time.”
Latta noted that under the law, FCC staff still have to write reports on how the telephone competes with the telegraph. “They can be doing something a little bit better” with their time, Latta said.
Broadband is about jobs, Latta said. “Something we want to keep bringing up over and over and over is how many jobs have been created in this sector,” he said. Laws must “reflect today’s marketplace and not impede further advancements in communications and other sectors of the economy.” Latta said Congress must make sure that the telecom industry doesn’t face too much regulation. “We should statutorily reform the FCC to codify … best practices, make the agency more transparent and enable deregulatory procedures to improve regulatory certainty,” he said.
Latta said he’s continuing to press for HR-3196, bipartisan legislation he sponsored that would repeal the cable integration ban. “It simply eliminates the unnecessary integration ban,” he said. “Cable companies … will continue to support CableCARD devices because they must or risk the backlash of their subscribers joining the growing trend of cord cutters.” Latta also sponsored HR-2649, the FCC Analysis of Benefits and Costs Act, which would require the agency to perform cost-benefit analyses on economically significant rules and otherwise reduce regulation.
Latta said he’s hopeful both bills will pass this Congress. “I'm not one of these people who likes to introduce legislation just to introduce legislation,” he said. “We have a very good opportunity to get these passed.”