The FCC Technological Advisory Council will next meet Dec. 4, starting at 1 p.m. EST at commission headquarters, the agency said Friday. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler once chaired the group.
Many small businesses don’t have access to broadband, and Communications Act Title II reclassification would make things only worse, the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council said in meeting with FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly, according to an ex parte filing posted in docket 14-28 Thursday. Reclassification could “negatively impact small business access to broadband, impair innovation in new tools and services that benefit entrepreneurs” and “drive costs higher,” the group said. It also met with Adonis Hoffman, aide to Commissioner Mignon Clyburn.
FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said the way ahead for Internet use should have a significant focus on inclusion of Americans with disabilities. She urged the FCC to continue the work that drove its efforts to implement the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, by continuing the discussion on accessibility in new technologies by design. Instead of playing an endless game of catch-up, “we can have accessibility and innovation walk together hand in hand,” she said Wednesday in remarks at the World Wide Web Consortium in California, posted by the FCC Thursday. Introducing technology, like wearable devices, on a global scale can result in “endless” possibilities for accessibility for people with disabilities worldwide, she said.
The FCC Form 477 filing interface, which closed Oct. 7 for technical improvements (see 1410080027), will remain closed until at least Nov. 10, said a public notice posted Tuesday in docket 11-10. After the site reopens, in about two weeks, the Wireline Bureau will release a PN announcing the new filing deadline for the form, which will be no less than 14 days after the notice, the bureau said. The form is used for local phone competition and broadband reporting.
The Computer & Communications Industry Association applauded the FTC’s lawsuit against AT&T for allegedly deceiving millions of its unlimited data plan users and throttling their data plans, said a CCIA news release Wednesday. The FTC Tuesday announced the lawsuit, which AT&T called “baseless” (see 1410280047). AT&T “failed to adequately disclose the specifics of the company’s policy of throttling data once customers reached higher levels of data usage over a month,” said CCIA CEO Ed Black. A Tuesday study released by the Measurement Lab Consortium (M-Labs) said the “problem of interfering with Internet traffic is even more widespread,” noted CCIA. M-Lab’s “analysis of connections between networks concluded that what Internet users assumed were technical problems connecting to Netflix or other content sites were really the result of pressure exerted by the subscriber’s Internet Access Provider,” said CCIA. Customers of major ISPs “experienced dramatically poor performance” when connecting to core Internet transit infrastructure, said the study (see 1410280036). Black said that it's "increasingly clear that a few powerful companies in this area continue to abuse their customers when they think they can get away with it, and continue to push for the weakest rules possible to allow them to discriminate and manipulate the services they provide."
JDI Dating will pay the FTC $616,165 as part of a settlement of charges of deceiving consumers to pay for memberships to the online service, the agency said in a news release Wednesday. The U.K.-based company “used fake profiles to make people think they were hearing from real love interests and to trick them into upgrading to paid memberships,” said Jessica Rich, FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection director, in the release. “Adding insult to injury, users were charged automatically to renew their subscriptions -- often without their consent.” The settlement also prohibits JDI Dating from “misrepresenting material facts” about its service and from not disclosing to members which virtual profiles aren’t real people, said the FTC.
National Religious Broadcasters cautioned against increased government control over speech on the Internet. The U.S. “rightly has made Internet freedom a foreign policy anchor,” NRB President Jerry Johnson said Tuesday in a news release. This follows a statement by Ann Ravel, Federal Election Commission vice chair, who announced last week her intent to re-evaluate FEC policies on political Web ads. The commission specifically exempted certain types of Internet communications from campaign finance regulations, Ravel said in a written statement. In doing so, the FEC “turned a blind eye to the Internet’s growing force in the political arena,” she said. The effort to protect individual bloggers and online commentators “has been stretched to cover slickly-produced ads aired solely on the Internet but paid for by the same organizations and the same large contributors as the actual ads aired on TV,” she said. The Obama administration must be careful “to avoid any action that could, purposefully or not, undermine free speech online,” NRB said.
The E-rate eligible services list (ESL) for funding year 2015 released in an FCC Wireless Bureau order Tuesday incorporates the changes the FCC made in July’s modernization order (see 1407140044), including the elimination of some legacy services in both Category One and Two. Among the “outdated, legacy and other non-broadband” services no longer eligible for support are Web hosting, email and paging. Category One voice services are being phased out, and Category Two support for LAN/WLAN-focused components, basic maintenance of eligible broadband internal connections components, and managed internal broadband services is limited, the order said. In response to comments that past versions of the ESL were “too long, difficult to understand, and confusing to work with,” the new list will not include the ESL glossary, special eligibility conditions or the ineligible services that had been posted at the end of each category of service, the order said. In response to comments applicants may not be aware of the services that are no longer eligible for E-rate support, the list includes a chart of those services in an appendix, the order said. The ESL also clarifies that multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) is eligible for Category One E-rate support, and the language in the list about digital transmission and Internet access services emphasizes that the commission understands flexibility is needed to provide support for services that facilitate high-speed connectivity, said the order. The ESL also redefines caching, which is eligible for Category Two support.
T-Mobile needs quick FCC action on data roaming to “rein in AT&T's pricing power,” Senior Vice President Andy Levin said in response to an AT&T blog post. "AT&T fails to acknowledge the predatory power it wields in the marketplace for data roaming,” Levin said. “AT&T is the only choice we have for roaming in 17 states. They use that monopoly power to force us into lopsided agreements that are on average 150 percent higher than we pay in markets that are competitive.”
A Communications Act Title II net neutrality approach would “not solve the paid-priority issue, but does create the risk of enormous collateral damage to both infrastructure and edge providers,” wrote Anna-Maria Kovacs, visiting senior policy scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Business and Public Policy, in a paper the center plans to release Thursday. Reclassification would “cause repeated shocks in an industry that greatly needs continued investment to keep up with exploding demand for mobile broadband services,” Kovacs wrote. Discouraging investment “would be particularly harmful at this time, given the need for increased capital investments and spectrum purchases,” the paper said. Reclassification would also “choke the Internet ecosystem,” which has been an engine for economic growth in the U.S., Kovacs wrote, and it would encourage other governments to follow suit, “endangering the success of American digital service- and application-providers abroad.”