The FCC is “looking closely” at hybrid approaches to net neutrality legal authority, combining Communications Act Section 706 and Title II, Chairman Tom Wheeler told Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and other lawmakers in a response released Thursday. “All options remain on the table, including Title II.” As part of the net neutrality roundtables, “we have heard views of experts on all sides of the issue, along with real-time input from the public,” Wheeler said. “A cross-Commission staff team is hard at work reviewing the many comments filed over the last four months.” Wyden is a strong backer of Title II reclassification.
Verizon dismissed fears of paid prioritization as “demagoguery,” responding to a letter from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. Last week, Leahy requested pledges against paid prioritization from Verizon as well as AT&T, Charter Communications, Comcast and Time Warner Cable (see 1410230041). “Unfortunately, the fever pitch over ‘paid prioritization’ and ‘fast lanes’ among advocates of greater Internet regulation is just demagoguery since no major ISP has expressed an interest in offering ‘paid prioritization’ and all agree that the FCC has a valid legal path to prohibit it,” Verizon General Counsel Randal Milch told Leahy in a letter Wednesday. “Verizon has no plans to engage in paid prioritization of Internet traffic.” He emphasized that paid prioritization is “theoretical” and a “phantasm,” without any history of an ISP even laying out the business case for crafting such deals. Milch bashed Title II reclassification and emphasized the FCC’s path to target paid prioritization deals under Communications Act Section 706. Verizon railed against Title II and restrictive regulation generally. “For example, some net neutrality advocates have attacked new business models, such as sponsored data or ‘zero-rating,’ that would save money for consumers,” Milch said. “Under these nascent arrangements, content providers could voluntarily agree to pick up the tab for usage-charges when consumers go to their sites. Or in other instances, such as T-Mobile’s Music Freedom plans, in order to differentiate its service a broadband provider could decide not to charge usage for certain types of traffic.” It would be “regressive” to ban potential “pro-consumer practices,” he said.
Scores of NTCA members spent Tuesday lobbing Capitol Hill offices on various priorities. They were in town for NTCA’s Telecom Executive Policy Summit. “After hearing yesterday from leading policymakers like FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly and FTC Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen, followed by conversations with key stakeholders from the telecom, education and public interest sectors, more than 100 NTCA members fanned out today for meetings across Capitol Hill,” NTCA Senior Vice President-Policy Michael Romano told us Tuesday. “In these meetings, NTCA members hope to convey the importance of near-term, targeted updates to essential universal service cost recovery mechanisms, the value of leveraging existing rural networks to serve critical public policy initiatives and the need to address outdated video content rules that hinder consumer choice and undermine broadband deployment and adoption.” NTCA members also joined the White House Rural Council for a meeting Tuesday to consider the Smart Rural Community Initiative, NTCA said in a news release. The event included remarks from executives heading the North Central Telephone Cooperative, Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative and Blue Valley Tele-Communications. “Expanding telecommunications is a central component of this administration's comprehensive effort to build jobs and economic security in rural America,” said Doug McKalip, White House Domestic Policy Council senior policy adviser-rural affairs, in a statement.
Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., worries the FCC’s proposed $10 million fine against TerraCom and YourTel America (see 1410240055) lacks “an appropriate deterrent effect,” he told FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler in a letter Tuesday. That proposed fine “may be seen merely as the cost of business to these carriers,” Nelson said. “Accordingly, I would urge the Commission to use all available authorities and penalties -- up to and including a revocation of the right to participate in the Lifeline program or provide other telecommunications services -- for companies that willfully fail to protect the PII [personally identifiable information] or other sensitive information of consumers.” Nelson praised the FCC for taking action against the companies and believes it has authority to do so. Nelson is widely expected to be the top Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee in the next Congress.
Four senators want Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations to properly account for cross-border data flows. Any agreement “must include meaningful, clear obligations, enforceable through a strong and effective dispute settlement mechanism, that prohibit unnecessary limitations on the cross-border transfer, storage and processing of data or the physical location of computing infrastructure,” said Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.; Commerce ranking member John Thune, R-S.D.; Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, D-Ore.; and Finance ranking member Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, in a joint letter to U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman Friday (http://1.usa.gov/1wwGCeG). “We urge you to stand firm against efforts by other countries to seek reservations and overly broad exceptions that would undermine these obligations and provide lower levels of protection for trade in digital goods and services as compared to other areas of trade.” House Commerce Trade Subcommittee Chairman Lee Terry, R-Neb., and Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., sent a similar letter to Froman and Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker Friday. “Trade agreements must acknowledge and support the growth of international trade through e-commerce, and cross-border data flows are the backbone of this growth,” the lawmakers said (http://1.usa.gov/1nCWMl5). “We urge you to secure enforceable commitments to free and open cross-border data flows around the world, for the sake of U.S. businesses and for a prosperous global economy.”
House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers, R-Ky., hosted a “Silicon Holler Express” bus tour of parts of his state last week, he said in a news release. “We're already doing high-tech business where high-speed Internet is available, but with Kentucky's new 'Super I-way,' we will be able to recruit even more complex businesses, and draw them to what I like to call Silicon Holler," Rogers said in a statement last week (http://1.usa.gov/1sYYRXH). "The first phase of the broadband project is expected to be complete in the next 18 months, so now is the time to plan our work and work our plan." He hosted 50 leaders from Kentucky to highlight this initiative, the release said.
The Competitive Carriers Association lauded five GOP senators for advocating a revamp to FCC Mobility Fund rules to focus on rural areas receiving high-speed mobile broadband. Sens. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H.; Roy Blunt, R-Mo.; Deb Fischer, R-Neb.; Jerry Moran, R-Kansas; and Roger Wicker, R-Miss., sent the letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler Friday. “The Senators are absolutely correct; rural households and businesses will benefit tremendously from high speed mobile broadband services,” Competitive Carriers Association President Steven Berry said in a statement (http://bit.ly/1wmwB5e). “It is well within the FCC’s authority to ensure rules for Mobility Fund II will allow rural communities to benefit from the same services as their urban counterparts.”
Phoenix Center President Larry Spiwak pushed back against the basing of net neutrality rules on Communications Act Title II, saying the proposal outlined by House Commerce Committee ranking member Henry Waxman, D-Calif., is "insidious." Waxman proposes to reclassify broadband as Title II and then forbear from the brunt of it, including sections 201 and 202. “While the FCC may forbear from sections 201 and 202, it cannot forbear from the mandates of sections 201 and 202, and it is these very mandates, not the numbers ‘201’ and ‘202,’ that expressly permit the paid prioritization that Waxman seeks so desperately to ban,” Spiwak said Thursday in an op-ed for The Hill (http://bit.ly/1rnx0NW). Spiwak said that “to proceed by reclassification with a gerrymandering of the commission's Section 10 precedent does nothing more than guarantee a third trip to the Courts of Appeal.” He attacked what he judges various legal deficiencies.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, headlined the poker “Jokers” list, released Wednesday by the Poker Players Alliance (PPA) (http://bit.ly/1pEW8PB). The list featured 22 Congress members, gubernatorial candidates and a Pennsylvania state House representative that the PPA said oppose Internet gambling. All the officials are seeking re-election or election to another office, it said. Chaffetz and Graham introduced the Restoration of America's Wire Act (S-2159) (HR-4301) in March, which would "restore long-standing United States policy that the Wire Act prohibits all forms of Internet gambling" (http://1.usa.gov/1zAdhjL) (see 1403270083). It has 18 House co-sponsors (http://1.usa.gov/1pu4UBU). Gambling experts told us the bill is unlikely to pass, given its perceived conflicts with states’ rights (see 1408050026).
Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., inquired about the practices of social media app Whisper, which specializes in anonymous sharing of messages. “While Whisper may provide its users a unique social experience, the allegations in recent media accounts are serious, and users are entitled to privacy policies that are transparent, disclosed, and followed by the company,” Rockefeller said to WhisperText CEO Michael Heyward in a Wednesday letter (http://1.usa.gov/1uLkuZv), asking the company to brief committee staffers on its privacy policies. “It is questionable, at best, whether users seeking to post anonymously on the ‘safest place on the internet’ would expect that WhisperText has information sharing relationships with third parties such as media organizations.” Rockefeller expressed concern about allegations that the company has tracked locations of consumers who didn’t want to be tracked and created an office outside the U.S. to process user data despite a policy to the contrary. He also flagged the way the company partners with third parties and shares content. "We share the Senator's interest in protecting consumer privacy and will respond shortly," Heyward said in a statement, saying Whisper disagrees with allegations reported by The Guardian and welcomes "the discussion and opportunity to correct the record."