Forbearance Not the Answer, Verizon Says; ACA Urges Exemptions From More Transparency Rules

posted Tuesday in docket 14-28. The provisions from which Title II proponents are willing to forbear are “not forbearance at all, or would involve forbearance from only those provisions of little practical consequence,” the letter said. Repeating its opposition to reclassification, Verizon said even “extensive” forbearance” wouldn't solve “the intractable legal problem” that neither the Communications Act nor the Constitution allows the agency to impose common carrier obligations on broadband providers, Verizon said. Title II proponents would “inevitably" also challenge the commission’s forbearance decisions, creating “investment-chilling uncertainty over the scope of future regulation, particularly given the inevitable propensity for regulatory creep,” Verizon said. Approving reclassification at the commission’s Feb. 26 meeting, but delaying forbearance decisions, would only be a “hollow promise of potential forbearance, of uncertain scope, at some uncertain future time,” the company said. “Separate forbearance proceedings would likely take years,” Verizon said, and “would be especially dangerous for the market because the possibility of legacy Title II regulations would hang over the entire industry like Damocles’ sword suspended by a single hair.” Separately, the American Cable Association urged the commission in a letter to the agency made available to us Tuesday to exempt small- and medium-sized broadband providers from any additional transparency requirements. Smaller ISPs “do not have the incentive or ability to engage in unreasonable or discriminatory practices, much less anti-competitive acts, which harm consumers and edge providers,” ACA said in the letter, which hadn't been posted by the FCC by our deadline. Additional disclosure requirements would “not only add untenable burdens on these ISPs, but provide no corresponding benefits for consumers or edge providers,” ACA said. Edge providers “have been shown to possess sufficient tools to alert them to whether an ISP is prioritizing its own content or discriminating against unaffiliated content. These parties have not hesitated to publicize suspected violations widely on the Internet,” the letter said. Consumer Watchdog urged the commission in a letter posted Tuesday not to forbear from 14 Title II sections, particularly Section 222. That section “is perhaps the most important provision from a consumer’s perspective,” the group said. “It was explicitly put in place so that telephone companies could not exploit their copper networks to impact people’s privacy. This vital protection should exist related to private information secured from digital networks.”