FCC Toll-Free Number Auction Plan Praised by AEI's Lyons; June FNPRM Worries NTCA's Romano
An FCC plan to auction toll-free numbers "promises several potential benefits," including the awarding of numbers to entities that value them the most, American Enterprise Institute Visiting Fellow Daniel Lyons blogged Thursday. A draft order for Wednesday's commissioners' meeting seeks…
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to establish a framework for auctioning toll-free numbers, starting with 17,000 "mutually exclusive" numbers in the "833" code that were the subject of "Responsible Organization" requests. An auction "deters strategic behavior by RespOrgs such as warehousing and hoarding of numbers, which can artificially exhaust the supply of available numbers and which the commission has expended resources in the past to combat," Lyons wrote. "The FCC also intends to lift its ban on resale of toll-free numbers for those numbers purchased in the 833 auction to allow development of a secondary market." The 833 auction experiment could be a "first step toward breathing new life into the toll-free marketplace," he said. Responding to a Lyons tweet, NTCA Senior Vice President Mike Romano was less sanguine in light of a June Further NPRM to phase out toll-free originating access charges, tweeting: "Toll-free is indeed a 'value to society.' But proposals now would eliminate payments by those that provide this service to the networks that help provide it. In other words, those that sell it get paid AND get to use other networks for free doing so. Must be nice. #economicsfail."