FCC Net Neutrality Inquiry Stirs Harsh Debate
Net neutrality proponents, and especially Google, have not given “concrete reasons” for such regulation, Hands Off the Internet told the FCC Monday. The filing responded to comments last month (CD June 18 p2). The FCC is asking if it should subject networks to neutrality rules. “There is no current or likely market condition that [opponents] can point to justify new regulations,” the group said. “Proponents rely… on conjecture, speculation and hypocritical assertions to suggest that the marketplace, notwithstanding the extraordinary success… of the Internet, must now be regulated in order to ensure consumers will be protected from non-existent harms.”
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Not so, said the Computer & Communications Industry Association, demanding that telecom companies “show us the competition” that justifies not regulating for net neutrality. Opponents of net neutrality in the first round of comments tended to be companies with “market dominance,” said CCIA in reply comments. Most other commenters favored strengthening FCC “policy principles” by making them enforceable and many “advocate the further adoption of clear nondiscrimination rules or structural separation of local transport services,” the association said. “Telephone and cable TV network operators insult the Commission’s expertise by summarily proclaiming the broadband access market competitive without any specific evidence of competition,” CCIA said. “Open Internet access and neutrality are not newfangled constructs. They represent highly successful public policy in the U.S. ever since the Internet was born.”
The New Jersey Rate Counsel said the FCC should stiffen its four non-binding net neutrality principles, making them enforceable and adding a fifth barring “nondiscrimination.” The agency also should require Internet access providers to educate consumers “about any limits that the providers may have on downloading, as well as about pricing practices and time limits on introductory rates,” said the state consumer advocate. Center for Creative Voices in Media, which represents media artists, said the Internet “promises to dramatically reduce the cost of production and distribution of video content” but not if “cable and telephone companies… can pick and choose who will get distribution over their ‘pipes’ based on discriminatory fees for so-called ‘priority’ service.”
The Open Internet Coalition expressed “disappointment” that network operators “declined to respond meaningfully to the questions posed” by the FCC notice of inquiry, but “instead rehashed their arguments that there is no problem in the broadband industry.” The group urged the FCC to: (1) Require broadband network operators to deal with concerns about “packet management and prioritization practices” that could be discriminatory. (2) Make the policy principles enforceable. (3) Add a nondiscrimination principle that allows “reasonable network management practices” but bars “discriminatory behavior with commercial motives such as favoring affiliated content or applications.”
Net neutrality proponents “provide no meaningful evidence that broadband providers are blocking or degrading traffic to particular web sites or that they are interfering in any way with any type of application, service or content,” said the National Cable & Telecommunications Association. A recent Federal Trade Commission staff report urging caution in eyeing net neutrality regulation “confirms the wisdom of the [FCC’s] deregulatory policy,” NCTA said. “Deregulation has produced substantial investment in broadband networks using all types of technologies and competition among providers ensures that the needs of consumers are being met.”
Proponents’ arguments for regulation are “purely theoretical,” offering no proof that “packet discrimination and degradation could occur,” added the U.S. Telecom Association. “In the absence of any verifiable misconduct by network providers, there is no basis for the [FCC] to reverse the very successful deregulatory course it has charted” for the Internet, it said.