The FCC should adopt net neutrality rules that address the full scope of harms of last-mile ISP networks, said New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute in a letter in dockets 10-127 and 14-28. The oversight and measurement regime should be structured to ensure that ISPs don't continue to use interconnection "as a mechanism for extracting tolls and degrading their customers' service," it said. A nationwide measurement endpoint platform with server placements geographically dispersed across major markets and key points of interconnection should be part of the regime, it said. There also should be a focus on measuring the technical indications of congestion levels "in interconnection paths between the end-user and a wide footprint of transit networks," it said.
If the FCC doesn't heed their and others' advice and fails to reclassify broadband as a Title II Communications Act service, it should forbear from enforcing all the title's restrictions, said 20-plus page filings by NCTA and its largest member, Comcast. Their individual filings, posted Tuesday and Wednesday in docket 14-28, said alternative net neutrality rules under Section 706 would be much less risky. If the commission goes the Title II route, "at a bare minimum," it "should be coupled with immediate, nationwide forbearance from all of Title II’s obligations and restrictions," said NCTA. Comcast said "proceeding down a reclassification path would be even more precarious in the absence of a grant of broad, nationwide forbearance from enforcement of all Title II obligations and restrictions, including those in Sections 201 and 202." The cable operator said the commission "has clear authority to grant such relief to broadband providers in a streamlined manner."
Some 680,000 comments filed at the FCC on net neutrality “were not transferred successfully” from the agency’s Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) to XML files made available by the agency, commission officials said Tuesday in a blog post. Gigi Sohn, special counsel-external affairs, and David Bray, chief information officer, said the agency received almost 4 million comments on net neutrality, and blamed problems on an 18-year-old comment system that “was not built to handle this unprecedented volume of comments nor initially designed to export comments via XML.” The problem was “due to a technical error involving Apache Solr, an open source tool the FCC used to produce the XML files,” they said. “We plan to fix this problem by issuing a new set of XML files after the New Year with the full set of comments received during the reply period." They said all of the comments were available on ECFS for public review.
The industry road map for ensuring indoor location accuracy for wireless calls to 911 has gathered wide support and the FCC should move quickly to incorporate key provisions into its rules, CTIA said in a filing at the commission. The four major carriers, APCO and the National Emergency Number Association proposed the plan last month. “Public safety representatives and agencies from across the country eager for dispatchable location,” technology companies, members of the accessibility community and the “national carriers and wireless associations including those that represent small carriers” all support the plan, CTIA said in reply comments filed in docket 07-114, posted by the FCC Wednesday. “The Roadmap is a concrete, carefully-negotiated and -balanced solution to help deliver new and better E911 location accuracy,” CTIA said. “To be clear, however, the Roadmap is intended to function as an alternative -- not a supplement -- to the proposed standards and timetables in the Commission’s NPRM.” TruePosition, which offers an alternative solution for indoor location accuracy, however, said it's hardly a “consensus” plan. It's “opposed by the vast majority of public safety officials who have participated in this proceeding” and “there is scant evidence that the Plan would actually work,” TruePosition said. The carriers just want to “postpone fixing” a problem they caused to begin with, the company said: “The premise of the Roadmap is that if the FCC will simply leave the carriers alone they will someday fix the problem of poor indoor location capabilities for emergency 911 calls.” Officials with Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing reported on a meeting at the FCC. The FCC should look at the road map and other solutions, advocates for the group said. “We want the same capacity we had when we had the landline phones,” the officials said. “During those days, all we had to do was to dial 9-1-1, and help would come, with much success. When we call for an emergency, the first objective is for the dispatcher to get our call, and immediately know where the call came from. Then the dispatcher can send police, fire, or paramedics to the scene of the emergency.” “The Roadmap outlines a clear path to delivering first responders the necessary ‘dispatchable location’ information in an accelerated timeframe,” PCIA said in its reply comments. The plan also “leverages technologies that have been proven successful in commercial location services,” like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, “rather than proprietary technologies without a commercial track record,” the group said. The road map was “the result of tough negotiations between APCO and NENA, on the one hand, and the Carrier Signatories, on the other,” AT&T told the FCC. APCO acknowledged the complaints of some 20 public safety commenters left out of negotiations on the road map. “Since finalizing the Roadmap, APCO has reached out extensively, and will continue to do so, to describe the Roadmap to all interested stakeholders and respond to any questions,” the group said. “Further, APCO welcomes the active assistance of these groups to implement the Roadmap’s solutions to this complex problem.”
The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association filed a prohibited written presentation Dec. 9 on E-rate modernization and the Connect America Fund during the sunshine period for the FCC Dec. 11 open meeting, the Office of General Counsel said in a public notice Monday. The text of the group’s filing wasn't posted by the FCC. Commission rules prohibit “making of any presentation, whether ex parte or not, to decision-making personnel concerning any matter listed on the Commission's Sunshine Agenda from the day after the Sunshine Agenda is released until the Commission releases the text of a decision or order relating to that matter or removes the item from the sunshine agenda,” the PN said.
The FCC's adoption interconnection rules to give certain parties more favorable interconnection terms would reward behavior that's already proscribed under Section 5 of the FTC Act, said Jonathan Lee, a telecom attorney. Netflix wasn't surprised that its customers experienced degraded service levels as result of its "limiting the number of Comcast interconnection points to which it funneled its traffic," he said. Netflix's decision to limit its number of transit vendors artificially "meant that these vendors' capacity between their networks and Comcast were bound to become overwhelmed, resulting in congestion," he said in a blog post. The commission shouldn’t deceive itself into thinking that "consumer welfare" is served by "preemptively granting concessions to prevent behavior that is otherwise flatly proscribed by existing consumer protection laws," he said. Lee has worked on behalf of AT&T and other competitive and incumbent telecom service providers.
The FCC Wireline Bureau said it has an additional $651,832 in Connect America Fund money for category one funding and $64,600 in category two funding available for next-in-line bidders seeking rural broadband experiments support. Six entities that the Wireline Bureau selected earlier this month to receive CAF funding have decided to withdraw from the funding process, the bureau said Tuesday. The Wireline Bureau also sought comment on petitions filed by 15 provisionally selected bidders who are seeking a waiver from providing a required audited financial statement. Interested parties should file comments by Jan. 6, with replies due Jan. 13, the FCC said.
The FCC released its E-rate order Friday, which increases the E-rate spending cap by $1.5 billion. The commission adopted the order at its Dec. 11 meeting despite opposition from Commissioners Mike O’Rielly and Ajit Pai (see 1412110049). Affected parties have 60 days from issuance of a Universal Service Administrative Co. or FCC decision to seek an appeal with the issuing agency or 60 days to seek an FCC review of a USAC decision, the FCC said in the order.
The FTC should review Oracle’s agreement to buy Datalogix, a digital marketing service, Jeff Chester, Center for Digital Democracy executive director, said in a statement Monday. Oracle announced the proposed acquisition in a news release Monday. “Datalogix aggregates and provides insights on over $2 trillion in consumer spending from 1,500 data partners across 110 million households to provide purchase-based targeting and drive more sales,” Oracle said. The FTC “must examine” the proposed deal’s “impact on competition and also protect the privacy of Americans,” Chester said. In light of the FTC’s consent decree with Facebook, which works with Datalogix, the agency should decide whether that decree “requires additional safeguards,” he said. “The growing consolidation of information on every American and whatever we do … should trigger action, as well as soul searching by both policymakers and the public,” Chester said. Oracle and the FTC didn’t comment.
The FCC is stopping its 180-day shot clock for the Comcast/Time Warner Cable deal because TWC didn’t produce requested documents in time, the FCC announced in a letter Monday. The clock is stopped until Jan. 12, the letter said. The documents in question were part of the FCC’s August information request, it said. Responses to the request were due Sept. 11. The missing information includes “in excess of 7,000 responsive documents [that] had been withheld based on an inappropriate claim of attorney client privilege” and weren’t given to the FCC until Dec. 8 and 9, and “in excess of 31,000” documents that weren’t produced because of “vendor error,” the FCC said. Though TWC initially said the latter documents would be produced Dec. 30, the FCC said it has recently learned that the documents and a revised privilege log will be produced Monday. “The effect of these late disclosures has been to slow down the Commission’s review of the Comcast/TWC/Charter transaction, in particular because sections of the review that staff had thought were complete now must be reopened to take account of the additional documents,” the FCC said. FCC staff has also been “hampered” in reviewing TWC’s initial privilege log because it's incomplete and contains errors, the order said. “The magnitude of the errors, with respect to both the document production and the privilege log, is material and the delays in rectifying them were substantial so that the tardy productions have interfered with the Commission’s ability to conduct a prompt and thorough review of the pending applications,” the order said. The pleading cycle remains active and reply comments are still due Tuesday, the FCC said. "We already have provided the FCC more than five million pages of documents and we will continue to provide the FCC everything that they need to review this transaction,” TWC said in an email.